Vagalumes. Four excerpts from a screen recording of one visit, at real speed, with sound, 27 September 2026.
Vagalumes
A memorial in which every person is a light, and every memory left for them keeps the light burning. First made in 2010 and lost, rebuilt in 2026 from the one video that survived.draft
Vagalume is Portuguese for firefly. The artist first made Vagalumes in 2010 at Shenkar College, as a memorial site in which every memory is a light. The original, a single Flash file, was lost with a drive; only a five-minute walkthrough video survived. In 2026 the machine split that video into 326 stills, read them one by one and wrote a specification, and the new memorial was built from that document.
The rebuilt Vagalumes is dedicated to the 413 people whose lives were lost at the Nova music festival and on the roads around it on 7 October 2023. Each person is a light in a dark sky. Visitors arrive at a single warm light and can leave a memory, which becomes a light of its own. More than twenty-three thousand memories, gathered from public memorial pages, are held there.
Each person has a page of their own, with their name, their age, their home and the memories left for them. Families can ask for a memory, or a whole page, to be taken down. The work argues against the internet's promise that being stored forever is the same as being remembered: a light here stays lit because someone comes back to it.
Made with Claude Code.