Swiss artist Dan Acher takes this celestial phenomenon and alters its original geographical setting to explore our ancestral need for communion with nature and our more recent compulsion to control it. High-power laser beams travel through particles in the air, creating fluorescent ribbons that slowly ripple through a sky changing from green to blue to purple. Through this collective gathering, Borealis draws out age-old emotions, legends and mythical tales.
What are we in the face of the forces of nature? Will we one day start seeing the Northern Lights in cities far from the poles they have inhabited for thousands of years? What does this artistic geo-engineering say about our desire to control the environment? What does it reveal about climate change and its effects on our lives, on our future, and our imagination? This simple yet awe-inspiring work sets out to transform an urban square into an artistic space for reflection, sharing, and emotional and sensory communion.
At the head of his laboratory of artistic experimentation and social innovation, Happy City Lab, Dan Acher is a mover and shaker who has been breaking up our routine in public space for twenty years, with some twenty installations around the world (Switzerland, Australia, the UK, Japan, France, etc.) that explore our relationship with the environment and our sense of community.
https://vimeo.com/191301289
BIOGRAPHY
Dan Acher
Dan Acher is an “artivist”, social entrepreneur and travelling teacher based in Switzerland. For the past twenty years, he has been creating artistic installations and participatory situations that shake up our daily urban routines and transform our vision of the city. As the founder of the Geneva-based creativity and social innovation studio Happy City Lab, he supports art that generates social and environmental change. Whether bringing together cyclists in New Zealand during his anthropology and management studies to protest the predominance of cars (Critical Mass), installing pianos (Play me, I’m yours), and giant switches (Turn Me ON), or creating a participative pop-up village, Exchange Boxes or a giant horse (Urban Rodeo) in public space, with his twenty or so artistic works, Dan Acher has constantly explored the idea of community in our urban imagination. As an Ashoka Fellow, he is invited regularly to talk about his work and vision at workshops and conferences around the world.
DISTRIBUTION
Dan Acher (creation & realisation), Oxsa (musical creation).
With the complicity of Le Liberté – leliberte.fr
