Spier Light Art “Flood Light” installation
Our floodlights and lighting control system have been chosen to form part of this art installation
We are proud to have supplied the lighting elements for an art exhibit at Spier Light Art in Stellenbosch, South Africa.
Spier Light Art is an annual event, hosted by Spier Wine Farm in Stellenbosch. The eagerly anticipated sixth edition of Spier Light Art will take place from 1 March to 1 April 2024. It's an interactive, nocturnal adventure featuring experimental light, sound and video artworks from local and international artists. Spier Light Art is free to the public and no booking is required. For more information, visit: https://www.spier.co.za/events/spier-light-art-2024
Abri de Swardt’s art installation “Flood Light” is exhibited at Spier Light Art. De Swardt explains: ‘“Flood Light” is a sculpture on the banks of the Eerste River at Spier Wine Farm. The work replicates a floodlight at the Danie Craven Rugby Fields next to the river at Stellenbosch University’s Coetzenburg Sports Terrain. However, “Flood Light” is detached from its mast, toppled over, cast adrift and eventually washed up at Spier through imagined severe flooding. Glitching and glowing both anxiously and mournfully, “Flood Light” speaks to the ecological state of the present while signalling our distraction from it.’
Our OMNISTAR-ECO floodlights have been chosen to form part of this art installation. The floodlights are controlled by Schréder ITERRA lighting control system.
If you feel inspired by the below Spier Light Art Installation video, have a look at our illumination range.
Application(s)
Conceptual Overview
‘“Flood Light” acts as a reminder of the ongoing extreme weather events made exponential, successive – and indeed anticipatory – during climate collapse, such as the Eerste River bursting its banks in the region’s worst recorded flood in over 45 years in 2023,’ says de Swardt.
‘Communities living along rivers are increasingly in precarious positions. Yet flooding events are inextricable from human encroachment upon the bodies of water they are dependent upon and which they alter in turn. From the onset of colonial settlement in the late 17th-century, the Dutch East India Company divided the alluvial flood plains along the entire span of the Eerste River into agricultural land, leading to hydraulic re-engineering like canalisation. Toni Morrison notes the word ‘flooding’ itself is an anthropocentric misattribution of a natural process. Rather than flooding, she writes that the river is “remembering”, “[r]emembering where it used to be”, as “water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was”. What arose from water, will again be submerged. “Flood Light” ultimately raises the prospect of the rewilding of the Eerste River.’
About
Abri de Swardt (b. 1988, Johannesburg) is an artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. De Swardt holds an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is a graduate of the Market Photo Workshop and Stellenbosch University. De Swardt positions his work as an expanded form of collage, moving between photography, video, sculpture, fiction, sound, costume, historiography, and performance in a convergence of the elemental and theatrical. In 2022, De Swardt was awarded a Social Impact Arts Prize.
We develop and manufacture energy-efficient LED lighting products in South Africa, designed and suitable for local conditions.
