Nicolas Sanchez L.

Nocturne I

[2016] Video Series. An ongoing portrait of night currently filmed in London, Berlin and Tehran. At night, the usual structure of cities, with its architecture of buildings, houses, public furniture, squares, gardens, vegetation, lamps, corners, streets and sidewalks, transcend their daylight physical appearance into deeper beings that conform a metaphysical alphabet of a mysterious realm. Walking the night not only sharpens our vision and hearing, but also brings the whole being into a state of alert and deeper resonance. The quietness and stillness of night scenes inspire a numinous mix of fear and attraction: to the uncertain, to diffuseness, to the incomplete and the never ending search for completeness. Artificial light, in the story of our cities, altered our perception of the night at the same moment that it brought it into view. That was the birth of the workday and nightlife as concepts, and the banishment of night was a symbol of the triumph of progress. The magnetism of light also implied the obliteration of darkness, and the nocturnal landscape is always an open, empty scenario that reveals this subtle struggle as a metaphor of human experience in nowadays cities.