Luzinterruptus: Lights Up the City

For fifteen years, the Madrid-based collective Luzinterruptus has transformed public space into a site of interruption, reflection, and now, touch.

Luzinterruptus is an anonymous art collective. Since 2008, they have worked from Madrid, using light as their primary medium. Consequently, their installations appear overnight in public spaces across the world, and disappear by morning. Over fifteen years, they have addressed plastic waste, water pollution, women’s safety, and the privatization of shared urban space. Nobody knows their faces. Indeed, that is part of the work.

IRK: What was the exact moment you decided light was your language? And why the street rather than a gallery?

Luzinterruptus: There was no exact moment. The members of the collective came from artistic practices linked to urban art, public space interventions and the forms of creative expression that emerged in Madrid during the years of the economic crisis.

We started working together in 2008, when many people felt the need to speak about what was happening around them. At that time, the street was the freest place to do so. Anyone could encounter an intervention in this shared space without consciously deciding to visit an exhibition.

Light appeared very early on, partly out of necessity. We had no money and worked with very basic materials. We would go out at night carrying backpacks filled with found objects and small autonomous lights. Quite often, the illuminated elements disappeared before the night was over because people took them away. That combination of scarcity, freedom and spontaneous participation ended up defining the way we work.

We like to illuminate ordinary objects, discarded materials and spaces that usually go unnoticed. We do not use light to dazzle. Instead, we direct attention toward things that were already there, but perhaps unseen.

Fifteen years later, we still believe that the street is one of the few places where very different people can encounter the same artwork without filters, entrance fees or the need to belong to any cultural circuit.

IRK: Someone stumbles upon your work at night, completely by accident. What do you want to happen inside them in that moment?

Luzinterruptus: We do not expect a specific reaction. Awakening curiosity is enough.

What interests us is creating a small interruption in everyday routine. Someone who was simply walking home suddenly stops for a few seconds and looks differently at a place they pass through every day.

We live surrounded by stimuli constantly competing for our attention. We like to think that our interventions create a brief pause within that noise. A moment of surprise that may become a conversation, a reflection, or simply a shared experience with other people present at that moment.

IRK: For years, your lights exposed plastic waste, climate crisis, and environmental collapse. Then something shifted. You turned toward the human body, women’s safety, and care. What pushed you to move from the planet to the people?

Luzinterruptus: More than a shift, we see it as an expansion of our concerns.

Environmental issues remain very present in our work because they continue to be urgent. At the same time, we have become increasingly interested in observing how these global tensions affect people’s everyday experience.

We have also begun to reflect more intensely on the transformation of public space. For years we were concerned with overconsumption, waste generation and environmental degradation. Today we are equally concerned about how common spaces are progressively occupied by private interests, advertising, commercial dynamics and forms of control that limit other ways of meeting and living together.

Working with waste materials emerged quite naturally. We used discarded materials because they were accessible, but we soon discovered their enormous symbolic potential. We were fascinated by the possibility that something considered useless could acquire a new presence through light. For years we explored this idea from many different angles, linking it to sustainability, consumption and waste management.

Interestingly, what seemed unusual when we began has become quite common today. Large-scale installations made from recycled materials are now everywhere. We are pleased that this has happened, but we also feel it may be the right moment to open new lines of research.

Light remains our main tool, but the questions we want to explore through it continue to evolve. In this context, the body appears as a particularly revealing territory. Before being citizens, consumers or users of a city, we are bodies that experience comfort, pressure, vulnerability, fear, the desire for contact and the need for protection.

Caressing Zone: The Art of Touch in Suspension

Hundreds of translucent arms hang above a public square. Sewn from discarded white stockings. Lit from within by cold light. They sway in the wind, brushing against passersby. The collective uses discarded hosiery to transform a symbol of domesticity into a ghostly, communal presence. Without faces or bodies, the forms remain ambiguous, allowing viewers to project their own interpretation of intimacy. Controlled by the wind, their movement turns the square into a shifting, tactile environment where touch feels accidental rather than designed.

IRK : Caressing Zone brings physical comfort into the cold street. Strangers stop in the dark to embrace glowing, soft shapes. What does this immediate need for contact reveal about the way we live in cities today?

Luzinterruptus: Caressing Zone is still a proposal, so we cannot speak about actual public reactions.

However, we have been surprised by the attention received by a project that has not yet been realized. It seems clear that it touches upon a question that concerns or interests many people.

What interests us is reflecting on how we currently inhabit shared spaces. Increasingly, public space is crossed by private interests, commercial messages, sponsored events and consumption-driven dynamics. There are fewer and fewer places where people can simply be, rest, meet or relate to one another without something being expected from them in return.

The project emerges from this concern. We wonder what would happen if an installation invited people to do precisely the opposite: stop, touch, stay, lean, share a moment with strangers or simply occupy a space without consuming anything.

More than a work about physical contact, we see it as a work about the possibility of recovering certain uses of public space that seem to be gradually disappearing.

Care Signage hijacks aggressive city screens. You turn traffic commands into messages of care, asking men to finally see the invisible tension women carry at night. Beyond just reading the glowing words, how do you want a man to physically alter his behavior in that exact moment?

Luzinterruptus: We are not interested in giving instructions or pointing fingers.

What interests us is making visible something that remains invisible to many people. Many women constantly develop strategies of vigilance and adaptation when moving through the city, especially at night. They evaluate routes, distances, gestures and situations that many men rarely need to consider.

The project avoids blaming anyone. Instead, it encourages reflection on how we share public space and how people perceive certain behaviors very differently, even when those actions lack threatening intent.

If the piece succeeds in generating awareness of that difference in experience, it will already have fulfilled an important part of its purpose.

We do not expect immediate transformations. Sometimes it is enough for someone to stop for a moment and become aware of a reality that had previously remained outside their field of vision.

IRK: You work at night, in public space, as women. The street at night is where fear lives. How does that fear shape the work? Or does claiming that space become part of the work itself?

Luzinterruptus: Public space is not experienced in the same way by everyone. The night often makes some of those differences more visible.

Like many other women, we are familiar with certain tensions that form part of everyday urban life. It is inevitable that these experiences influence the way we observe and think about the spaces we inhabit.

At the same time, we are particularly interested in understanding these issues from a collective rather than purely individual perspective. The way we design, occupy and share our streets, squares and parks profoundly shapes how we feel within them.

We do not want to surrender those spaces to fear. A significant part of our work consists precisely in imagining other ways of occupying the city, sharing it and making it more open, welcoming and accessible to those who use it.

In that sense, working at night is not only a technical matter related to light. It is also a way of claiming the city as a common territory that belongs to everyone.

IRK: Every installation comes down by morning. Does the disappearance break something in you, or is that exactly where the power lives?

Luzinterruptus: We accepted long ago that disappearance is part of our practice.

Of course, there is a certain sadness when a piece disappears after months of preparation. But we also believe that a large part of its strength lies precisely in its temporary nature.

People know that what they are experiencing will not be there the next day. That awareness changes the way they observe, participate and remember the experience.

We like to think that the works disappear physically but continue to exist in conversations, photographs, memories and in the small transformations they leave behind in those who experienced them. Perhaps that is also why anonymity has always made sense to us: we prefer the projects to remain in people’s memories rather than ourselves.

IRK: When you turn off your last light, what do you want the city to remember?

Luzinterruptus: Not necessarily the artwork itself.

We would like the city to remember that it can be used in many different ways from those we usually take for granted.

Squares can become places for free expression. Streets can become libraries. Forgotten spaces can turn into places for encounter. Waste materials can gain new life.aterials can acquire a new life.

And that citizens do not necessarily have to be passive spectators. Many of our projects exist thanks to their participation, their objects, their words or their time. We have always been interested in creating situations in which people can actively contribute to the work rather than simply observe it.

That public space remains one of the few places where very different people can share a common experience.

If we manage to make someone look differently at a place they thought they knew perfectly, we feel that the light has fulfilled its purpose

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