Clio Capeille

-Is it getting dark? -It depends. -It depends on what? -It depends on us. -The electric sun is too low, only fake darkness is glowing. - Darkness makes me dance. -You could fight against the melatonin running in your veins. - Why do you want to manipulate nighttime? - Mankind is already fabricating it anyway. - In the dark, you’re not tangible. - It’s blind thoughts; you’re blurred with too much light. -Is it an overdose? -It’s a political device. - The contrast is getting diluted; nighttime is being eroded. - It’s a black suicide… - Revolutions are night embryos. - And what happens when the sun comes out? - We have re-invented daytime.

Stressed under tension between economical intensification and progressive erosion, nighttime has become an endangered species. These tendencies are shaping a future 24-hour, non-stop city drawing no difference between night and day. The ‘Night Decompression zone’ is a night-imagined territory informed by the qualities of nighttime used as a source. Using darkness as a material, the night-imagined buildings amplify the human psychological and physiological estates of the twilight condition, the interim period between waking and sleeping. Within a lunar night-plant landscape contained by the city-glow boundary, the ‘Decompression chamber’ is the gateway bar to darkness; the elevated ‘Pre-reverie observatory’ offers an artificial light constellation view; the ‘Release centre for nycto-therapy’ treats biological tolerance of real darkness; and the glass ‘Hypno-cinema’ uses natural blackness to trigger the creative delirium of this decompression period.