The Dark Is Bright

The Dark is Bright is a project brought together by a partnership of three social change organisations to explore the question of how to hold creative spaces for loss and create opportunities for positive change. 

Through a 10-week programme, they guided three cohorts on a journey of conversations and creative experiences - sharing and listening to each others’ stories of loss, undertaking guided exercises and self-reflections to help make sense of loss, and finally exploring creative ways to express loss and create hopeful visions of the future. Each cohort used their shared experiences to create collaborative short fiction films in order to better understand their own experiences and those of others.

The work of this project was a response to the many ways loss has manifested itself in our societies over the past year and a half since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. Many of us have lost loved ones, lost our jobs, lost many of the basic freedoms we had taken for granted. These losses have triggered the question: “What do we do when the futures we imagined for ourselves disappear?” 

Exploring and going deeper into loss isn’t necessarily maudlin or morbid, though. In fact, mourning is an important process for allowing us to live our lives more fully - by processing loss and grief, we can learn that these experiences and the pain they have brought us actually mean something. Not only that, but mourning can also clearly reveal to us what things really matter, and give us the energy to pursue them. In this time of deep social inequity and environmental catastrophe, we need the focus and energy that come from mourning loss to inspire the changes we want to see, making sure we don’t go back to a ‘normal’ that wasn’t working.

To learn more about The Dark is Bright, you can explore their beautifully designed website here.