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Tulips grow – Tulips glow
A light installation proposal for city of Eindhoven´s yearly Light Festival, together with Maria Evaggeliou in 2009.
The central bus station of Eindhoven seems to be a dull space where hundreds of people come running to catch up the bus on their way to work. Nothing seems to distract their attention which is primarily focused on the arrival-departure billboard. If you ever happen to have waited there you must have noticed the smaller rolling billboards that keep rolling posted commercial advertisements. Every billboard is changing rolling message at different times, offering a pleasant movement of images at different spots in the same space. Throughout the night the setting is same but the atmosphere drastically changes: no buses working, the space is emptied out of people and something eye catching is happening: the rolling billboards are lighten up and the moving images glow in the dark empty space like dancing alone. This choreography of images almost converts the somehow dull during the day space into a dynamic installation space. This observation and the possibilities offered by the specific setting triggered our imagination and the only thing we could do was to start thinking of proposals…
Basic idea was to introduce an element of nature in this artificial mechanical system of rolling images. We imagined tulips hopping up from billboard to billboard, in different colors. The background of images could be black so that only tulips outline is seen and not the distractive black billboard frame. The rise of tulips growing at different spots could serve as a comment on the stiff communication language used at these billboards, no text, no human representation, just flowers dancing in the space. This installation could also serve as a total communication tool for Light Festival since many people are passing from this spot because it is central. At the same time we regard this intervention fitting in the specific dry and artificial landscape surrounded by tall buildings and the cement ground and with the specific use of space.