Switch on the light

Next to the label with the installation title “Switch on the light” there is an old-fashioned light switch which belongs to a small chamber. The door of the chamber is missing for the narrow entry remains open and expose nothing but darkness. The switch is connected to a bulb that brightens the room for visitors who switches on the light. It turns on a faint light and the closely chamber keeps its awkward atmosphere.

But now the visitor can see an electric bulb drown in a cylinder made of bees wax. It is put on a stool over an old bucket of water. Because of the heat of the electric bulb the wax starts to melt after few seconds and drop through a whole in the stool into the water-bucket underneath. The sound of the dropping wax and the splashing water will effect a closely and uncanny feeling.

A timer will cut off the light automatically after three minutes if the visitors forget to turn it off when they leave the room. In an ironic way the idea behind this installation is related to an environmental issue. You can see a candle-like object using electricity to brighten up the small chamber.

Nearly everything (switch and stool, bulb-socket and water bucket) seem to be somehow old-fashioned in this installation. But instead of using the wax in the traditional candle-like way of burning a wick to generate light out of the relation of matter and time, an external and artificial source of energy is introduced in the chamber for the very same purpose. It brightens the room but not more than a candle, and it melts down the wax but not less than a flame. In a quite similar way renewable energy has been and will be always present. But instead of using it, we keep on exhausting the non-renewable energy and burn down the planet.