The Dark is Bright, 2021

I’ve been curious about how some of the most successful political slogans of recent years seem to be grief laden - ‘Take Back Control’ and ‘Make America Great Again’ both hark back to imagined time before something important was lost. My hunch is that unless we learn to work with grief more collectively, the politics of grief and brittle grievance will continue to drive us into catastrophe.

The Dark is Bright was a chance to explore this during covid-19, a time when so many people had lost something important. It was a 10-week journey through grief, creativity, and collective imagination for people experiencing a ‘loss of an imagined future’.

Loss is not linear. It lingers and shape shifts as it shapes us. The Dark is Bright invites participants to sit with the shape shifting and see what it has to offer them.

Small groups. Screens lighting up across cities and villages. People arriving with their losses—raw, old, tangled. A father. A friend. A future that never happened.

We made it clear that it wasn’t therapy. Just time, care, community and space to imagine.

Each cohort became a temporary collective. Together, we created short fiction films rooted in personal experience and intuition. Participants wrote narratives that speak to absence and possibility — fragments of memory, of dreams, of the in-between. A man becomes a tree. A girl becomes light. A story flickers and finds a new shape.

Visit thedarkisbright.com to learn more.

A Canopy project, co-led with Hannah McDowall, in partnership with Rooted: Julian Thompson and Zaisha Smith; and the Loss Project: Carly Attridge and Steph Turner.

Funded by The National Lottery.