Design Map · Eindhoven
Enactments of a Fading Sunlight Zone
Graduation project by Martina Costa Bignotti at Design Academy Eindhoven, 2026. Shown during Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven on Design Map, location F5.
‘Enactments of a Fading Sunlight Zone’ is a lecture-performance and stage that investigates the phenomenon of ocean darkening. As sunlight and moonlight penetrate less deeply beneath the ocean’s surface, the sunlit zone that sustains marine life contracts, disrupting ecosystems and making the ocean’s depths even harder to perceive. Developed in collaboration with the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ), the project combines scientific research with myth, metaphor and performative storytelling to make ocean darkening more tangible. A lecture unfolds within an installation that’s both a laboratory and a stage, with an overhead projector, water experiments, lighting and underwater recordings that reveal the ocean’s changing character. By translating scientific knowledge into an embodied experience, the work invites audiences to approach humanity’s entanglement with environmental transformations occurring beyond the limits of our perception.