Dark Fog

Dark Fog is a solo exhibition by visual artist Silvia Loeffler presented at the Pumphouse, Dublin Port about transitional experiences of citizenship and migration – why people are leaving and why people are coming, and how we can address mental mid-states of ‘not-having-arrived-yet’, or, perhaps ‘never-really-arriving’

Various speakers/performers and participants from diverse backgrounds were invited to NCAD to join Silvia in a mapping workshop day based on the following questions: What does it mean to belong; to feel home; to have a voice; to feel connected to our ancestors?

Silvia’s vision for this show was to create an experimental art work about the psychological points of transition, where the Pumphouse as an industrial sanctuary becomes a space of possibility, a welcoming place that offers capacity to navigate the dark fog, with a sort of wayfinding akin to seafarers reaching the port.

In the site-specific installation, mappings of paths, crossroads, and what holds us along the way flow into one another and through various veiled fabric pieces, almost as if obscured by dark fog. “Real life” plays between that curtain landscape, where we get glimpses of what it means ‘to cross’; when that moment of realisation hits us – ‘we made it’.