“I want to love it again.
Love myself in it.
Have a value, not a price.
But it’s hard to love something that doesn't love itself.”


After Light: These Dark Citizens is a transdisciplinary visual art installation that unfolds across an urban landscape, presenting an intricate blend of sculpture, audio-visual elements, performance, geo-locational audio, and poetry. From the tangible installations to intangible auditory landscapes, this piece leverages the night’s anonymity to invite viewers into a realm where boundaries between the self and the urban blur. 

Sculptures and installations punctuate the journey, bringing inanimate objects—traffic lights, road signs, bus stops—to life with poetic and subversive installation and language that critiques capitalism’s encroachment upon the nocturnal. By anchoring the work in specific urban locales and allowing it to evolve with the audience's physical movement, the piece disrupts traditional boundaries of gallery-based art, embedding a series of personal and mythic narratives within the fabric of the nocturnal city. The city’s architecture thus becomes both antagonist and protagonist, a liminal portal guiding viewers through a meditation on the individual within the collective, a space both haunted and hopeful, where the invisible becomes vibrantly tangible under the canopy of night. 

This durational encounter turns the city into a dynamic canvas, where ephemeral art installations and geolocated generative audio experiences through headphones and freely available software engage directly with the streets, architecture, and night-time rhythms. Through walks curated to recalibrate the body’s sense of place with the architecture around it, the city’s structures seem to breathe, imposing and compassionate, embodying a cosmological weight on the audience. 

The engagement with After Light oscillates between the pedestrian and the cosmic, embedding a visceral awareness of the mythological self within the concrete sprawl. The integration of Echoes’ generative audio technology allows audiences to co-create the narrative with each step, rendering the city an ephemeral archive of testimonies, memories, and songs. This framework engages the audience’s agency, inviting decisions that reveal fragmented memories of urban life, pulsating with themes of isolation, wealth disparity, motherhood, the reclamation of self and the fractured experience of night. 

Credits: Concept, Direction, Text, Design, Music, Sound Design.

Commissioned by Sparsile Collective in association with National Sculpture Factory and produced by Once Off Productions, After Light: These Dark Citizens is a collaboration between multi- disciplinary artist Peter Power (CMF Artist in Residence), visual artists Lorraine Neeson and Padraic Barrett and lighting designer Stephen Dodd.

Images by Jed Niezgoda

Video by Epic

Supported by the Arts Council and Cork City Council.

Generously supported by Echoes.