When public space is shrinking and democratic backsliding feels routine, how do you make dissent visible? At re:publica 2026 in Berlin, architect Thomas Schielke offered a luminous answer.
“Never gonna give you up.” The motto of re:publica 2026, Europe’s largest festival for the digital society, drawing thousands of thinkers, activists, and technologists to Berlin each year, set an unexpectedly defiant tone for a conference about culture, technology, and democracy.
Thomas Schielke’s argument was urgent and timely. Climate breakdown, far-right parties normalising themselves in parliaments, democracies hollowed out by algorithm and slow habituation: the problems, Schielke acknowledged, feel larger than the tools available to contest them. Powerlessness, he warned, is the enemy of hope. And hope needs an image – a sign that someone has not stopped. His chosen image was light.
The intellectual arc ran from Picasso’s Guernica – a hand thrusting a lamp into the darkness of the Spanish Civil War, an act not of enlightenment but of refusal – to a living lineage of artists who inherited that gesture. Krzysztof Wodiczko, who in 1983 projected nuclear missile imagery onto Stuttgart’s Victory Column, established the genre’s founding principle: monuments are not neutral, and light can make them argue back. Now 83 and still active, Wodiczko projected in Washington just weeks before this lecture. Greenpeace took the method further, logging more than 650 light interventions on cooling towers, ministry facades, and oil platforms since 1988.
Schielke’s most striking examples were recent. In January 2025, drones assembled letters of light above a crowd in Bochum — weeks before the German federal election, in what he described as likely the world’s first drone protest against right-wing extremism. Earlier, Led by Donkeys and the Zentrum für politsche Schönheit projected onto Tesla’s Gigafactory in Brandenburg.
What makes light so effective? It reaches facades no banner could cover, crosses security perimeters without touching them, and leaves no trace by morning – no paint, no prosecution, only the image in memory and the screenshot in the feed.
Yet Schielke was candid about the limits. Striking images are not legislation. As the form succeeds, it risks being absorbed by the forces it opposes – corporate spectacle, party branding, aestheticised protest without substance. His answer: insist on what follows the moment of wonder. The image must become dialogue, dialogue attitude, attitude action.
Hope, he concluded, is not a feeling one has. It is a decision one takes — particularly in the dark.
Complete recording of the re:publica talk: (in German, English subtitles available via YouTube)
In the Protestant Church in Oberrahmede, architect and lighting expert Thomas Schielke spoke about art as a form of social resistance – from protest projections in Los Angeles to AI images from Iran. In the discussion that followed, it became clear what these global signs have to do with Lüdenscheid.
It is dark in the Protestant Church in Oberrahmede on this Friday evening. Not only outside. Dr Thomas Schielke begins his lecture by stating that night is not just a time of day, but a state of being. A metaphor for a time when news weighs heavier than hope, when freedom seems vulnerable and the question arises as to what remains when certainties fade. Schielke does not talk about bright lights that dazzle. He talks about the light that remains. About hope.
The church is well filled. People sit close together, as if this proximity were already a quiet response to the theme of the evening. Schielke, an architect and lighting expert, has been working at the interface of design, art and social change for years. His lecture is not a linear argument, but a journey through images, interventions, projections, quotations, books and political events. A slide show that is more essay than presentation, more cultural criticism than specialist lecture.
It begins with Picasso’s ‘Guernica’. In the midst of the chaos of this world view stands a child with a torch. No heroic light, no salvation, just a small flame. ‘Perhaps that is hope at night,’ says Schielke. It is a thought that carries the evening: hope does not end suffering, but it contradicts darkness.
From there, it leads to Caravaggio’s ‘The Calling of Saint Matthew,’ to that narrow beam of light that transforms an everyday space into a moment of decision. Here, art becomes a moral resonance chamber. Not as decoration, but as an imposition: would we be willing to stand up and step into the light?
The wall as a political surface: Statue of Liberty projection by Vjaybombs at an intersection in Los Angeles on the evening of September 11, 2025. Image: Vjaybombs
Light as the opposite of darkness
What follows is an international journey through places where light becomes a political gesture. Under motorway bridges in Los Angeles, the artist collective VJayBomb projects the Statue of Liberty onto a bridge pier. It slowly sinks into the water, the torch remains lit. Not a monument, not an iconic place, but a ‘non-place’ made of concrete. It is precisely there that the symbol of freedom appears – vulnerable, close, human. The projection lasts only minutes, but it permanently changes the way we see this place.
In Madrid, citizens protest as holograms in front of parliament because real gatherings are prohibited. In Chile, the word ‘humanity’ is projected onto the façade of a high-rise building – and demonstratively erased by security forces, which only serves to spread the message even further. In Bochum, drones take to the skies and write political messages in the sky. Art, as Schielke shows, is not decoration here, but action. Not illustration, but intervention.
Time and again, it is about courage. Not heroic courage, but the quiet courage of arriving, of looking, of setting off, of standing firm, of telling new stories. Quotes from Luisa Neubauer, Maja Göpel, Daniel Schreiber, Hannah Arendt and Karl Popper are interwoven with the images. The lecture is dense, almost exuberant, but never arbitrary. It revolves around the question of where society draws the strength not to remain silent.
If we are not prepared to defend a tolerant social order against the attacks of intolerance, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
Karl Popper, philosopher
If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant puts its foot on a mouse’s tail and you say you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.
Desmond Tutu, Archbishop
It becomes particularly poignant when Schielke discusses current AI-generated videos from Iran. People with lights in their hands walking through the streets at night. No leader, no stage, just many individuals walking side by side. The light does not come from above, but from their hands. In times of internet blackouts, the smartphone becomes not a means of communication, but a source of light. Hope without pathos, but with force.
Here, the evening shifts from aesthetic contemplation to political urgency. Schielke talks about disinformation, the power of social algorithms, authoritarian regimes and the need not to counter intolerance with false tolerance. Art becomes a seismograph of social tensions. And then he asks the crucial question: What does all this mean for Lüdenscheid?
Photo: Thomas Krumm
From global panorama to local responsibility
In the second part of the evening, Schielke talks to Dominik Hass-Sommer, chairman of the cultural committee in Lüdenscheid, and Pastor Michael Siol. After the global perspective, the focus shifts to the local level. But the conversation does not feel like a break, but rather a continuation on a different level.
Hass-Sommer describes how much our perception of the world changes when we look at it through real encounters rather than social networks. Election campaigns, club work, light routes – everywhere he experiences optimism, commitment and community. ‘The reality is often very different,’ he says. Algorithms distort, encounters ground us.
Siol picks up on this idea. Hope arises where people treat each other kindly. At the same time, he warns that values need guidance that goes beyond majorities. ‘Many people with torches can also be a torchlight march,’ he says, pointing to the need for clear ethical guidelines.
What emerges here is not a political debate, but rather a reflection on how the church, politics and culture can work together to create spaces for resonance. Hass-Sommer talks about alliances against intolerance, democratic compromises and culture as a place of encounter. Siol recounts stories of community festivals, picnics at the fire station and children’s musicals – of hundreds of volunteers who create moments of light in everyday life.
On this evening, Lüdenscheid does not appear as a provincial town, but as a laboratory. As a place where small decisions determine whether the light will be passed on. The church proves to be not a backdrop, but an equal sounding board. The sacred place reinforces the effect of the images and thoughts without appropriating them. Here, there is no preaching, only reflection. No moralising, only questioning. In the end, there is no dramatic conclusion, but a quiet thought: hope at night is possible because it is carried. Not by individuals, but by many.
When the visitors leave the church, it is still dark outside. But the light from the windows accompanies them for a while. Perhaps that is the real point of this evening: that art, church and society are not separate spheres, but together guard those little flames that contradict the darkness.
Videos of projects shown by various artists and activists are available at these links:
Light not only makes better use of architecture, but also allows it to be interpreted. Both daylight and electric lighting offer a variety of ways to design interior and exterior spaces. This seminar at the University of Wuppertal teaches the basics of perception-based lighting design to introduce the tools architects can use to enhance the quality of architectural designs. Combining theoretical principles with exercises, enables to understand the interplay between light and architecture and confidently develop lighting concepts.
The course consists of eight modules at the University of Wuppertal. Guest lectures with outstanding experts are part of the curriculum. The course for the summer term 2022 had a special focus on the Solar Decathlon Europe and analyzed the international projects in regard to daylight and lighting. The course light and lighting has been part of the School of Architecture and Civil Engineering since 2020 and is open to Bachelor and Master students.
Curriculum
Part A: Perceiving light
Module 1: Introduction architectural lighting Module 2: Perception of light, lighting technology for illumination
Part B: Understanding light and architecture
Module 3: Light in urban space Module 4: Light in interiors
Part C: Developing lighting concepts
Module 5: Daylighting Module 6: Sustainable lighting design Module 7: Light in museums and offices Module 8: Presenting lighting concepts
Daylight Study
Model with direct sunlight in the morning, noon and evening
Rising protests in recent years to address ecological, social and political issues have motivated artists and activists to reflect their strategy of interventions. In this connection light has become an attractive element to create striking images and videos to enhance press and social media communication. Different new forms have emerged. Previously using a sea of candles to show solidarity and to express unity has been replaced with bright LED flashlights from mobile phones. Projection with graphics and text enable artists and activists to underline their core messages or even to temporarily take possession of iconic landmarks. In fact, the luminous form of protest has allowed creative minds to circumvent governmental restrictions like forbidding gatherings of large groups. The smart use of light to enhance protests was already visible in the Occupy Wall Street protest and has been evident in recent demonstrations regarding climate change, Black Lives Matter or the LGBT movement. Artists like Krzystof Wodiczko, Robin Bell, Jenny Holzer, Dustin Klein, The Illuminator collective, Joanie Lemercier and Delight Lab have created projects in the recent years to address the rising social, ecological and political issues in the USA, South America and Europe.
If your protests or publication should be considered please send me an email.
Yesterday evening, thousands of people formed a huge peace sign in Budapest’s Heroes’ Square to protest against the invasion of Ukraine and to express their compassion for the innocent victims of the war. via @greenpeaceHU#NoWarpic.twitter.com/kbWRcknHRQ
#SceneBuzz: GLOBAL GRASSROOTS MOVEMENT ‘LITER OF LIGHT’ EXHIBITS SUSTAINABLE INSTALLATION MADE WITH SOLAR LIGHT AT ART D’EGYPTE’S ‘FOREVER IS NOW II’ pic.twitter.com/2PEOtbKx7s
UEFA has declined a request to light up Munich's Allianz Arena in rainbow colors for Wednesday's Euro 2020 match between Germany and Hungary. https://t.co/vXezAiZER3
The artist Shirin Neshat has unveiled large-scale digital works to be shown in Los Angeles and London's Piccadilly protesting the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in Iran @circa__arthttps://t.co/xTzPGc7av5
Deutschland und Frankreich stehen gemeinsam an der Seite der #Ukraine als Teil der europäischen Familie. Wir stehen für eine Europäische Union, die für Frieden und Freiheit, für Demokratie und Rechtsstaatlichkeit steht. #WeStandWithUkraine#EuropeDaypic.twitter.com/JR90JloqX4
— Bundeskanzler a.D. Olaf Scholz (@KanzlerScholz) May 9, 2022
I projected on the Russian Embassy tonight and embassy personnel tried to drown out my image of China’s Xi kissing Putin with their spotlights. A fun game of cat and mouse with their huge Z’s and V’s 🙂 pic.twitter.com/rbEf4fcszy
Greenpeace members light candles forming the words "climate justice" on the promenade over the relief map of the Philippines at Rizal Park in Manila to mark the 11th anniversary of Tropical Storm "Ondoy", pic.twitter.com/Z9q9aUIUDE
— ARPAS-UK, the UK Drone Association (@ARPASUK) June 6, 2019
In memory of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade. Projected over the crowd at City Hall during a long moment of silence. pic.twitter.com/FT9K6IKvVR
“The way that history is represented and told is never neutral.” Leah Dickerman reflects on protesters' calls to remove Confederate monuments “as a response to flesh-and-blood outrage over Black lives lost and disregarded.” https://t.co/6FOJx5uohf
— MoMA The Museum of Modern Art (@MuseumModernArt) June 10, 2020
Hundreds of protesters shined laser pointers at the Hong Kong Space Museum, Wednesday, August 7, to protest the police arrest of a student who was buying a laser pointer the day before. Police arrested Keith Fong on the grounds that he possessed offensive weapons the day before. pic.twitter.com/6DS8zLq634
Ambiente en Plaza Dignidad a las 21:14, se destaca la proyección lumínica "renace" en la Torre Telefónica mientras manifestantes se encuentran llenando los alrededores.#ChileDesperto#PlebiscitoChilepic.twitter.com/rZfdrROm2H
O palácio do Congresso Nacional recebeu uma projeção com frases para marcar a entrega de uma petição com mais de 400 mil assinaturas, que pede a retirada de garimpeiros ilegais da Terra Indígena Yanomami, localizada nos estados de Roraima e do Amazonas. https://t.co/tZ8b7VXuaq
The success of corporate design guidelines ends with holding on to past values while the environment has changed dramatically. Numerous retail brands de ne not only their furniture and materials but also their lighting. While the standards focus on good visibility, interior designers have recognised that lighting can be a powerful medium to communicate the core brand values. Focal glow, creating brilliance and drama helps to emphasise the exclusive and high-end character of a brand. In contrast, di use brightness of light lines underlines the equality. This warehouse look is typical for low budget supermarkets, where accent lighting could confuse the consumer’s expectation for a bargain.
Software-driven LED media façades provide new capabilities for projecting dynamic visualizations of data onto buildings as an integral part of the architecture and urban appearance. Although this trend with luminous facades including dynamic content is often linked with commercial signage and advertising, it has revived a longstanding critical debate about the roles of architectural ornamentation and iconicism. Yet media façades are becoming more than a canvas for static and repetitive brand displays. Some installations integrate sensors and interfaces to heighten their dynamism and social engagement. Using smart networks, their luminous performances are no longer restricted to a single building, but can include several buildings simultaneously. Furthermore, intelligent networks can link façades around the world. Due to these developments, designers, as well as users, need to gain experience in order to meet the challenges of connected cities, participatory models and visualization techniques. The spread of responsive surfaces will lead to new forms of urban communication. Their design will determine if we will encounter superficial monologues or long lasting memories. The following overview of sensor technology reveals the extent to which media façades react dynamically. In addition, this relatively new technique of visual light communication introduces LED light as a data transmitter.
Publication
Urban Data as Light – From Sensor-Driven Media Facades to Data Communication Through Visual Light. In: a +u (Architecture + Urbanism). 2014, 530, p.56-61.
The column “Light Matters” on ArchDaily explores the development of contemporary light patterns, technologies and visualisation techniques to detect historical influences and to critically discuss the progress of light and architecture. Since 2013 the articles have presented for example masters of light like Tadao Ando, Louis Kahn, Norman Foster or Zaha Hadid. Talking about sustainable approaches regarding daylight, illumination or outdoor lighting are an essential part of the column as well.
ArchDaily has become one of the 1,000 most visited websites on the Internet, according to the latest Alexa Internet ranking in 2020. More than 360,000 users visit the flagship English-speaking platform every day, which when combined with the network of Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese sites, creates a daily global audience of 650,000 people: the most visited architecture network in the world.
Klaus-Jürgen Maack (1938-2019), former CEO of ERCO, presented an impressive speech for his product designer Alois Dworschak, who retired after having worked for ERCO for more than three decades.
Klaus-Jürgen Maack was born 1938 in Lüdenscheid. He studied as printing engineer in Stuttgart. From 1965 till 2003 he was managing director of ERCO. He introduced ERCO´s maxim “We sell light, not luminaries” and introduced a paradigm shift for the company. His book “ERCO Lichtfabrik” offers a comprehensive overview of his corporate design and product design approach. With his visionary management the company received numerous awards for graphic and product design. He was awarded with the “Bundespreis für Förderer des Designs”. Maack was also chairman of the board of the Design Zentrum Nordrhein Westfalen. Mr Maack started originally an apprenticeship as industrial management assistant in a printing press in Bremen and studied printing in Stuttgart. In 1963, he started to work at ERCO in Lüdenscheid. With leading product designers he introduced innovative luminaire programs. In the mid of the 1970s he initiated the collaboration with the graphic designer Otl Aicher for defining the corporated identity for ERCO as a basis for the visual communication. Projects like the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Louvre in Paris or the Reichstag in Berlin are illuminated by ERCO.
Principles useful for thinking in light according to Klaus-Jürgen Maack:
Light is “the fourth dimension” of architecture. Light interprets spaces, makes them perceptible, makes it possible to experience them.
Light is invisible in the light path. Light is therefore a medium that is not visible, but makes visible.
Light includes shadow, semi-darkness and contrast to make space or objects an experience.
It takes many light sources to make a room appear dark, perhaps more than to make it uniformly bright.
The quality of perception and the quality of vision are the result of good lighting.
The prerequisite for good lighting is visual comfort, i.e. glare-free and reflection-free light.
Light on vertical surfaces is usually more important for perception than light on horizontal surfaces.
Seeing is the most important sense of perception before smelling, tasting, hearing and feeling.
Ambient luminescence, focal glow and play of brilliants is the basic structuring for luminaire development as well as for lighting design.
The luminaire is first and foremost a lighting instrument, a lighting tool for a specific application and not an aesthetic object.
The respective luminaire fashion may be good for the respective fashion of room decoration, but it probably solves lighting problems more by chance – not consciously.
Whoever illuminates a room must think in terms of light qualities and not in terms of beautiful forms.
Principles were published in the ERCO book “Lichtfabrik” in 1990.
Germany-based essayists for the SuperLux book, and leading European light artists and lighting industry publishers and advocates, debated recent developments in the smart light cities movement, at an English-language symposium hosted by the Faculty of Architecture at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in 2016.
On a benign winter’s evening during the city’s Christmas celebrations, the faculty’s Acting Dean, Professor Hannelore Deubzer, welcomed speakers and delegates to its rooftop seminar centre, the Vorholzer Forum, then introduced Dr Thomas Schielke, a SuperLux essayist, light architecture columnist for ArchDaily, and a communications and education leader with ERCO, to conduct the presentations.
SuperLux speakers at sunset on the roof court of TUM’s Vorholzer Forum. From left: Alison Ritter, Marco Neuss, Richard Cervinka, Vesna Petresin, Thorsten Bauer, Thomas Schielke, Davina Jackson, Joachim Ritter, Nuno Galvao, Peter Droege, Lutz Harrer.
SuperLux essayists Schielke, Vesna Petresin, and the book’s editor, Davina Jackson, spoke about recent developments in urban light art. Another essayist, Peter Droege, clarified the beyond-urgent need to power cities only with renewable sources of energy, but noted that lighting amounted to only about two percent of the world’s total energy consumption.
Three decades ago the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank (HSBC) Headquarters by Norman Foster emerged onto the architectural seen as an exemplary product of industrial design. The open layout with its exposed steel structure generated a powerful corporate identity for the bank. But the restrained atmosphere of white architectural lighting and the lack of distinctive façade lighting has lost its attractiveness after sunset. Now the colorful and dynamic relighting presents a remarkable example of how an architectural icon has shifted from a productivist ideology towards a scenographic image.
Bettina Pelz, curator for light festivals, explains the difference in light festivals within Europe and in a global context. She discusses the developments in cities like Sydney, Singapore, Lyon, Eindhoven, Berlin and Lüdenscheid. About Bettina Pelz: Focus of her exhibition practice is light as material and media in contemporary art, integrated design and digital media. Since 1999, and since 2001 partly in cooperation with Tom Groll, she developed various exhibition formats. She lives in the German Ruhr Region.
