Hut Made of Light

Part of a residency in Tjibaou Museum, Nouméa, New Caledonia, South Pacific in 2019, for the kid festival Pikinini.

In 2019, visual artist Cillia Darmizin and I built a structure in a public outdoor space during the Pikinini Festival in Nouméa. 3,60 meters wide, 2,40 metres tall, half open. The hut has made of wooden sticks and cyanotypes textiles printed by hand. We used what was already there: New Caledonia has some of the strongest UV levels in the world, because of damage to the ozone layer above the Pacific. That light is a fact of the place. We used it as a material for exposing the Cyanotype prints. We placed paper and plants in the sun and let images appear.

The hut was an interactive place to enter, touch, and add the participants’ printed creation. Children between two and eleven years old walked inside it, sat in it, and made their own prints during workshops and could add it to the existing canvas hand-sawn to the structure. Around sixty children took part. They put a leaf or a flower on paper, left it in the sun, and watched something change. The intervention used a local environmental condition as a starting point. It created a temporary space in a public to create connexion between the body, the light, the materials, and the public of the festival.