Ghost Town (2026)

At I Light U festival 2026 we revealed our light art installation Ghost Town. Ghostly animals can be spotted among the plants around the station area. Their outlines glow with a pale light while their silhouettes only reflect the office buildings around them, making them appear like some portal to another world, or a hole in reality. All the different animals in Ghost Town are animals that might have lived here in Utrecht, if not for the city and the many people living there making that impossible.

The animals are a glimpse at an alternate reality where animals inhabit the space that people and the city now occupy. Perhaps they are an apparition from the distant past, when this was all unspoiled wilderness, or perhaps it’s a vision of a future when the city lies abandoned by people, to be reclaimed by nature. As we saw around the world during the Covid lockdowns, once the people are gone, even temporarily, it does not take long for animals to wander back in and claim the streets as their own.

Ghost Town aims to make us think of these possible different realities, about our relationship as people to the animals that share our world, and about the tension between nature and the city, as we’ve recently seen with the reactions to the wolf finally returning to the Netherlands.