The darkness

It is the fifth time we meet with the high school students at the museum. I’m standing in the middle of an exhibition room with two young people, and we settle down to arrange a miniature diorama they have built on a stool for the opening of the pop-up exhibition. We have to be careful not to drop their work because the stool is narrow and covered with a black, slippery fabric, and it is dark in the room.

The museum’s exhibition lights have been put off because we wanted to put on special atmospheric lighting and that way bring the artwork done by the young people into the spotlight. Now we only have some flashlights with us, which give quite restricted sight.

As the artwork has been carefully put in its place, our focus on the centre of the room wanes. We start to notice, to realize, how dark it is around us.

“Damn it!” one of the young people suddenly shouts. “That bear totally freaked me out!” A taxidermied bear in a diorama behind them seems to have crept closer without us even noticing. “I have never realized how big that bear actually is!”

They point the flashlight at the bear - the bear that stands in exactly the same place as always. Yet the atmosphere has totally changed. The darkness has magically changed the appearances of the still beings in dioramas. As if they came to life, released from their bound postures. We become equal, or even subordinate, to them. It feels like they can see better in the dark than we do, the darkness is theirs. They might lurk, move behind the trees without us noticing anything. Shadows move restlessly as the flashlight beams move around in the room. The familiarity and safe distance with the animals in dioramas we felt earlier is lost.

Our conversation turns enthusiastic, we move in the space in a different way than before, more alert. We talk aloud about our observations.

“Imagine, I bet the animals in the forest observe us just like this! And we don’t notice anything.” “Look how the eyes of this snow leopard shine - how can glass eyes shine like real cat eyes?”

Some kind of strange liveliness lingers in the midst of the humans, the diorama beings, and the darkness. We humans become cautious strangers, we cannot predict or assume to know what happens in common worlds.