We are now in the holiday season, a period that, in terms of lighting, displeases us due to its ostentation and lack of aesthetic taste. Furthermore, we cannot stop thinking about the exorbitant spending of public budgets and the energy consumption it involves every time we step outside. Our cities seem to measure their relevance by the height of their Christmas trees and position themselves on tourist maps based on the brightness they project into space.
Project Name: To Arms! (A Christmas exercise that will never come to light)
Studio Name: Luzinterruptus
Since we began working with light, we have taken advantage of this season to carry out an aesthetic and reflective exercise in the form of a provocative Christmas decoration. We’ve ventured into the streets to create guerrilla art pieces, and we also enjoy imagining projects that, although we know they will never be realized, summarize concerns or events that deeply unsettle us.
Our proposals have addressed numerous contemporary issues. From environmental concerns to social reflections, we have tackled problems that worry us. Recently, the topic of war has taken over our imagination. Every day we feel it closer, and we need to highlight the absurdity of ignoring it while decorating our cities with bright and ornamental lights.
This year, we’ve fantasized about a large-scale Christmas piece (dreaming is free). We imagined trees and garlands typical of the season, constructed from illuminated toy weapons. In our vision, these weapons would come from donations by families who decide to remove them from their children’s play routines.
Ideally, we hope that, upon seeing these colorful plastic weapons transformed into Christmas decorations, people would question whether it is truly necessary to give these kinds of toys as gifts and what values we are transmitting with them. Most importantly, they would reflect on why we celebrate so ostentatiously while witnessing, in real time, how children suffer and die in wars of hatred that have nothing to do with them.
Whether we like to admit it or not, war is becoming increasingly present in our reality, and toy weapons, even if made of plastic, perpetuate an idea we should not normalize.
We imagine a large mountain or tree filled with toy pistols, rifles, and machine guns, serving as a colorful and luminous monument to disarmament and surrender. Transforming objects traditionally tied to war imagery into a piece displayed on the streets might make us pause, even briefly, to consider what we teach and transmit to children and what we wish for their future.
The proposal would be simple to execute, using the conical structures often rented in towns to set up Christmas trees. These would be covered with toy weapons illuminated from within, transforming them into an explosion of color and recognizable shapes. The garlands would follow the same logic: the lights crossing the streets would be adorned with toy weapons of various sizes and colors, tangled together in a chaotic but luminous display.
Let’s be realistic: this proposal will never come to fruition. Not because it is technically complicated, but because it feels uncomfortable during a festive season full of «good» love and consumerist excess. Furthermore, its execution would require significant logistical effort and considerable dedication from all parties involved. It would involve finding institutions and associations willing to participate in collecting the toys over an extended period, coordinating all the logistics, and finally producing the project.
But since imagining is something we excel at, we leave this light proposal here, one that will never see the light of day. And in the meantime, we remain in the dark to celebrate, as we do every year, that we don’t have much worth celebrating.
