Ljusresan / The Light Journey
Ljusresan / The Light Journey is a performative work developed by Torbjörn Johansson and Daniela Hedman within the collaborative framework south east / south west in 2022
Medium: Plastic painted with fluorescent pigment, activated by sunlight at Lisö (Sweden), transported to Tarifa and later to the Andalusian mountains.
The project explores light as both physical phenomenon and experiential material, tracing its movement across geography, time, and perception.
A sheet of plastic, painted with fluorescent and phosphorescent pigments, was first exposed to sunlight on Lisö. Charged by solar light, the material was then transported south to Tarifa and later into the Andalusian mountains. Through this displacement, light was not represented but carried—absorbed, stored, and released in new spatial and climatic conditions.The work engages with a paradox at the core of human experience: light is immaterial, weightless, and intangible, yet fundamental to how we orient ourselves in the world. It cannot be measured by volume or weight, cannot be grasped or contained—yet it shapes landscapes, architecture, bodies, and perception. In Ljusresan, light becomes something that can be handled indirectly, gathered through material sensitivity and released through presence and time. Activated in darkness, the painted surface emits a vivid green glow, unfolding as a fleeting event rather than a stable image. What appears is not the sun itself, but its afterimage—transformed by touch, movement, and distance. The performance stages an impossible gesture made temporarily real: the carrying of light from one place to another. As writer Jonas Ellerström notes, Ljusresan realizes a dream of light. Through direct, bodily interaction—hands, fingers, and palms moving between pigment and surface—the artists make visible something that usually escapes capture. The work proposes light not as an object, but as a condition: something that can be folded, unfolded, remembered, and momentarily set free.