Join ‘Speos’, a poetic, audible journey into a mountain cave through the eyes and ears of a person stripped of everything he knows. Being deep inside the earth confronts you with your loneliness, with the actual sound of silence and so silence and darkness become composed and interwoven – the immersion in the dark makes it alive and physical. In this deep, almost platonic dark, every sound is the difference between life and death. Is there a notion of dark sound beyond metaphorical meanings?

In a realm of the audible maybe darkness is silence – the dark as the absence of sound. What happens when we try to bring forth everything that darkness normally hides from us? The philosophy of dark ecology deals with the notion of everything sharing a sensibility that we normally consider purely human. Humanity needs to realize that we are not on top of everything, and ideas of dark ecology is way of illustrating how much of our reality is beneath our vision, beyond our control. Darkness is hidden but crucial to tune into – this is where other senses than eyesight are useful.

The dark as a positive space for unrestrained physical action. In a black and noisy void like the Berlin club Berghain, our bodies can be absorbed in a darkness of sound, dance, maybe of trance and disappearing – a way of unleashing ourselves from habits of everyday life connected to screens, pace and efficiency. Engulfed by nightlife and through decolonial curatorial practices, the mind and body are set free, enabled to discard the common notion of darkness as non-knowledge, opposed to a widely recognized (Western) perception of Enlightenment as a shared truth and ideal.

Darkness as non knowledge

Når mørke er normaltilstanden, hvordan opleves så lyset? Og natten? Blindfødte Jonas reflekterer over forskelle og gråzoner, over mørket som ro, og fornemmelsen af lys som en tryghed. Mørket er dobbelt for de ikke-seende øjne, det er der hele tiden, men er stadig distinkt – ikke som noget ondt eller farligt, men som koncentrationen og det velkendte.

In visual art, as well as most other aspects of life, a consistent attempt to align darkness with everything evil, demonic and unwanted has prevailed ever since Greek and Roman antiquity. From the late Middle Ages however, we start to depict changes of time in which differences between glow and shadow, day and night are inherent, so from the beginning of the 15th Century time starts to play a visual role in pictorial art. Notions like ‘sfumato’ and ‘chiaroscuro’ have been developed by art historians in identifying blurring of light and shape and the hard duality between darkness and light in paintings from Da Vince to Rembrandt.

Thinking against the currents of the Enlightenment, the physical and mental craving for light, as a way of avoiding hypervisibility. Choosing the space of darkness, of opacity and shadows as a way of actually seeing yourself – maybe the physical sight is overrated: in a world where everything has been reduced to visibility it can be helpful to sharpen our other sensen, to rehearse different sensibilities. If light is control, darkness is a retreat for contemplation and knowledge.

With Big Bang, the universe sent out light for the first time and since then there has been no actual darkness out there because photons, the light particles, can be caught at all wave lengths. However, the universe still contains the astrophysical paradox of dark matter, a missing mass, which can only be detected by looking at bright matter. This dark matter seem to have been present in the universe even before the Big Bang as an invisible pre-material – at the same time fundamental and incomprehensible. Without darkness we wouldn’t be able to see the light.

Experiencing the physical qualities of darkness as research for Kirstine Roepstorffs Venice Biennale projects cleared the way for an embracing of darkness as a positive force. In a self-experienced way, trying to accept and welcome dark emotions can be a helpful tool for being in your grief, in depressive states or a gloomy mind. Darkness is a space for discovery whether it’s in shape of a universe, the deep sea or your subconsciousness.

Night falls in the Jordanian desert and Roepstorff and his family are nested in a stormy canyon of wind, darkness, stars and emptiness. With time the contours of a landscape appears, bushes and hills and recognizable shapes, the senses are sharpened. In surrendering to the dark we exist in a gap: we are more awake than asleep and more paralyzed than active.

Blandt kvækkende frøer går Anders Laugesen ind i natten: Eksistensens urgrund, det, der var inden lyset, kontroltabet og overgivelsen. Ud af mørket viser livsretningen sig, det er kan være kærlighedens sted, det ydre mørke kan hele et indre mørke – hvis vi tillader os selv at se det.