Vincent Laganier: What is your best memory of the 2011 edition?
Andrea Mantello: One of my best memories of the 2011 edition was when the participants discovered the effects of the various lighting components in the darkness of heaquarter’s basement. They started to play and experiment with the different lights and I had the distinct feeling at that point that they had understood the importance of lighting design.
VL: How did you work with the participants?
AM: Many of my efforts were directed towards building the team spirit based on the ambition to design a project they would all share and could all be proud of. I pushed the participants to discover the dire effects of lighting and come up with a solution to improve the situation. The site of the Three houses was a large one, so I subdivided it and split the group into smaller teams. Once or twice a night general meetings were set up so the site could be retraced and analyzed piece by piece on each occasion. This organization entailed that each participant would take part in the general discussions and was responsible for one part of the project.
VL: Why do you think it is important to organize the lighting workshop?
AM: In my view it is not just important, but fundamental to organize a lighting workshop like the one held in Alingsas. To be on site and experience a lighting design project as it is made day after day can only be learnt by doing. On one of the last days one of the participants asked me to recommend a book for beginner lighting designers and I answered that the best book would be to put a warm jacket and start testing lights out in the street. A book can provide many notions but there is nothing as instructive as direct experience.
Indeed in Alingsås I had the impression participants understood the lighting design process more and more without having to learn about it theoretically and in abstract terms.
VL: What do you think about the final result?
AM: I’m very pleased with the final result, but even more about the process behind it.
I sincerely enjoyed the metaphorical and poetic aspects of the project, the way in which we collectively came up with a fairy tale and then translated this into a three-dimensional painting where step after step a new view, a new protagonist, a new perspective are discovered….and then the real world comes into the picture once again…
VL: What is your vision for the lighting design profession?
AM: The lighting design profession is above all a specialization which needs more recognition. There is still al lot to do to promote the profession and this is a difficult task, not because of the design itself, but rather because it is hard to induce people to understand the profession’s importance and the benefits it can offer society. Nowadays we are increasingly conscious about the implications of consumption levels and sustainability, and for this reason the lighting design profession is becoming more important. However, lighting design can not only exist because of technical requirements but needs to preserve its designerly nature: lighting design is inherently linked to creative processes and inspired by natural phenomena. It is therefore both a question of staying imaginative but at the same time resourceful, something that lighting design shares with architecture, my original disciplinary background.
Photo: Robert Persson
Why this Blog?
Stefan Graf video
Lighting effects
