Furkan Titiz in Conversation with Livia Klein
What are you presenting at (capsules)?
What do you do with a mountain of unwanted lights? Throw them into rubbish bags and blindly trust the recycling system, of course. But what if some of these lights don’t need recycling at all? What if they still work? At (capsules), I am presenting Lichtmüll, a growing light installation made of discarded lights and glowing rubble bags. The bags pile up in the shop window, creating a strange sight: a mountain of rubbish that lights up from within after sunset. The installation grows every week as more discarded lights arrive.
Where do the luminaires come from?
There are different reasons why luminaires become waste. Some are removed during renovations, others sit unused in warehouses, and some are returned or discarded because they were ordered by mistake. Another source is demonstration units made to present new products, and for Lichtmüll in Luxembourg, I focus on these. When lighting companies launch new products, they produce demonstration units that are sent to lighting consultants to present the latest designs. The luminaires in the exhibition were originally produced for clients and lighting projects in Luxembourg. These samples are individual fixtures, not enough to light an entire building, and they are generally not sold. After serving their purpose, they are usually discarded. The irony is that these luminaires are designed to last around 100,000 operating hours, yet the ones in Lichtmüll have been used for less than 100. That means they have used less than 0.1 per cent of their designed lifetime before becoming waste.
You write that nearly one in three discarded luminaires still works at the moment of disposal. How did you come across this figure?
While researching what happens to luminaires during building renovations and lighting upgrades. It completely changed how I look at discarded objects. We naturally assume that things are thrown away because they are broken, outdated, or useless, but those aren’t necessarily the same thing. A building is renovated, a new standard comes into play, or a design trend shifts, and perfectly functional equipment instantly becomes waste. I suspect the real number is even higher, especially in retail spaces like the very one this work is exhibited in. Retail is driven by corporate identity. Every time a new shop moves in or a brand updates its image, the entire interior is gutted and replaced. Thousands of fully functional, highly efficient LED lights are ripped out long before they ever wear out. For me, this challenges the comforting illusion that waste is simply the natural end of an object’s life. Why is total replacement always our default setting? And why do we allow corporate aesthetics to override ecological logic?
Why construction waste bags? You describe them as a kind of waste that “has learned to look like nothing”.
Construction waste bags are everywhere during renovations, and most of us barely notice them. You don’t need to know what’s inside. The bag is almost the final step in making something disappear. In the first weeks of the installation, I could observe this firsthand: during the day, almost no one realised that an artwork was growing there, which was exactly the goal. At one point, a real construction company even dumped its own waste right in front of the window. For me, that was the ultimate confirmation. I deliberately chose white bags, not only for technical reasons, because of how they transmit light, but also to reflect the innocence of these discarded, fully functional objects. Inside the bags, their individual identities disappear, and everything becomes just waste. But at night, they prove they are still alive.
At night, the only light in the window comes from what was thrown away. How is this light different from designed light?
Designed light is all about control and intention: where it should fall, what it should reveal, how it should make a space feel. Here, the situation is the absolute opposite. The light is an escape act. It comes from discarded objects, fighting its way through a material that was meant to bury it. The white bags distort the beams, interrupt them and create shadows in unexpected places. The result is messy, raw and completely uncontrolled. I’m not trying to stage a beautiful light effect. The light highlights the bizarre reality of these objects: they were ripped from their context, but they refuse to die. They are still doing exactly what they were engineered to do, except now they are screaming it from inside a pile of rubbish.
That is far from what you learned as a lighting designer. How did you move from designing light to making art with it?
Studying architectural lighting design gave me a very specific way of looking at the world. You start noticing light everywhere: how it shapes a space, how it affects how we feel, how much it influences our everyday lives without us even realising it. But over time, I became just as interested in what is usually left out of the conversation. We spend so much time thinking about how to bring light into a space, and very little time thinking about what happens to the fixtures when we no longer need them. At some point, I became more interested in asking questions than in solving problems. Art gives me the freedom to question the systems behind light, without having to offer a solution or make things look better. Sometimes, I’m more interested in making people look twice.
At the LiTG Light Slam in 2024, you proposed treating light pollution with the same legal urgency as physical garbage. How does Lichtmüll continue this thought?
The Light Slam was the first time I used an artistic format to question light itself. I had just two and a half minutes and a rubble bag to communicate an idea to lighting professionals, industry representatives and academics. Winning the award, and even more the feedback I received, showed me that art could be a meaningful way to communicate within this field. Sometimes a different perspective can open up a conversation that technical arguments alone cannot. With Lichtmüll, I wanted to see what happens when the question leaves the stage and enters the physical world: something people can experience directly, at their own pace, without me having to explain it.
The work grows every week and has no fixed end date: “It closes when the waste stops arriving.” What does it mean to make a work whose duration is set by the problem itself?
Usually, you are the boss of your artwork. You decide when it is finished, you pack it up, and you put it in the exhibition. With this project, I completely lost that control. I don’t know how big it will get or where this journey will end. To be honest, not having control is a bit uncomfortable. But it reflects the reality of the situation: we are trapped in a loop of constant buying, updating and discarding, and this is how our society lives.
You also write that the work does not assign blame. Why was it important for you to avoid pointing fingers?
Because the process is more complicated than finding one person to blame. A luminaire might be selected by a lighting designer, purchased by a client, installed by an electrician and eventually removed during a renovation. Each person works within certain constraints: budgets, regulations, technical requirements, the wishes of a building owner. The person who removes a luminaire might have very little influence over the decision to replace it, and the person who specified it might never know what happens to it years later. That doesn’t mean nobody is responsible, or that every decision is equally justified. But I’d rather make the whole chain visible and ask where we might do things differently than point at one person and call the problem solved.
After the exhibition, the working luminaires will be redistributed or donated. Do you see the work also as a practical intervention?
I think we are only at the very beginning of recognising this as a problem. Everyone talks about efficiency and saving energy, but the most efficient luminaire is the one that is never needed and never produced. My primary goal is to make this issue visible. Just as there isn’t a single person to blame, we can only address this problem together. To keep the conversation going, the idea is to turn Lichtmüll into a travelling exhibition, and we are already in discussions about its next destinations.
A shop window usually presents new products. Yours shows discarded ones in a vacant storefront. How did you approach this setting?
Have you ever seen a shop window displaying glowing rubble bags? Probably not. Shop windows are usually designed to make us want things. The bags are something we normally want to get rid of, yet the light makes us stop and look. You might wonder what you’re looking at, and whether it’s art or just rubbish. The glass also creates a physical barrier: we can see the bags, but we can’t reach them. At the same time, we see our own reflections in the glass, right next to the waste. We become part of the picture, a reminder that responsibility is shared.
What kind of encounter do you imagine for passersby who might not expect to see art there?
I like that Lichtmüll interrupts the daily routine without asking for permission. You’re on your way to work, thinking about your to-do list, and suddenly there’s a pile of rubble bags in a shop window. Not exactly the luxury shopping experience you were expecting. Because the installation is on a busy street, people might pass it twice a day, and in winter they can experience two different versions. In daylight, the bags look like ordinary construction waste. After sunset, the discarded lights inside them come alive. Some will stop, some will keep walking, and all reactions are welcome. If the work makes someone look twice at the things we throw away, even for a few seconds, that’s already something.
How does the context of Luxembourg City shape the way you think about the work?
I find it interesting that these objects come from the same region where the installation is shown. They’re not some abstract idea of waste from somewhere far away. They’re part of the everyday transformation of the places around us. By bringing them into a shop window in the city, I’m putting a small piece of that process on display. We usually see the finished buildings, the new interiors, the shiny results. We rarely see what gets left behind to make room for them.
Finally, what do you hope stays with viewers?
I hope people start questioning what we call waste, and maybe stop believing that throwing something away makes it disappear.