What do you summon? How do you deceive? Do you wish to challenge eternity?
Can we have a chat?
I enter the house and touch the switch. You diffuse. Do you like the theatre? You belong more to time than to space. You sculpt and you severe. In theater, light reveals and so does the dark.
In theater, everything hidden shows. What do you think?
At times, the very first 
tear my 
away from my 
.
What makes you so fast?
Where do you go at night?
Which legends do you follow?
We have a few about you.
Can you see yourself?
If you were reversed, would you still be the same? If you were emptied, too? Are you tired? What happens when darkness arrives?
Is darkness your sister or another face of yours?
She creates space, makes room for something unseen. Who are you? Do you know that sometimes we are afraid of the dark?
It transports us to a 
outside of 
, where there is neither 
nor .
opens up.
Do you agree that in theater, both darkness and light are artificial: fake darkness and fake light?
The of perceptual is or . At the same time, this 
of is entirely filled with —a that is not the 
of , but rather the of a sensation, even more than that of a .
Darkness, just like consistency, seems to be more linked to matter, to fullness rather than absence. Do you agree that true darkness never exists, not even in nature?
If there are any , they reach 
only
after having passed through that 
.
Perhaps in theater true darkness can exist? How can I construct you?
Darkness agglomerates, it unites.
What do you think?
How do we enter and navigate the darkness? How do we let it enter and guide us, take over us? Engaging with darkness not as a zone of fear but as a realm of the unseen, of summoning forces, of appearance and disappearance from the invisible, and of optical illusions that transcend the power of the gaze have been at the centre of Lavanderia’s thematic trajectory over January and February, culminating with the Dark MatterS winter festival and celebrating darkness as a space-time in which to see present and future with other lenses.
This documentation composts materials from the collective residencies τέχνη – téchne and Annotazioni Superficiali, which researched spatiality and the dynamic of listening respectively through the mediums of theatrical light and sound, and the artistic residency and performance Alloro_varietà aurea (by the company Technologia Filosofica) with its exploration of the body, it’s capacity to open spaces and summon ghosts by illuminating and making sound appear. The documentation captures the iconography of fleeting forms into a transmutation that transcends all three events. What emerges, instead, is a reflection reminding us of our need to mythologize impermanence –
such as the darkness –
in order to elude fear by reappropriating the fantastic.
Mythologization unfolds as a complex system of representation where the knowledge of the body and senses summon a plurality of knowledge, celebrating the multiplicity of how darkness can be experienced, practised and conceptualized beyond its conventional opposition to light. Mythologization transforms the collective experience into a symbolic expression, animating darkness into a poetic object – a totem to have conversations with, to navigate and resignify the unknown.
The text is cut up from thoughts and conversations that emerged during the residencies of τέχνη – téchne and Annotazioni Superficiali.
The drawings are created by the students of class 3P of Primo Liceo Artistico di Torino in the frame of Alloro_varietà aurea artistic residency at school.
Article and video by Kadri Sirel.