Save the date: Come in with confidence, and you will be warmly received

The photographer spent more than four years in the Norwegian village of Gamvik, including a year as keeper of the world’s northernmost mainland lighthouse. The local museum asked him to document its old mechanism, one of the last Fresnel lens optical systems still in operation. This system of enormous glass rings greatly magnifies the light source, allowing its signal to travel far out to sea. The invention that revolutionised maritime navigation around the world in the mid-19th century was marking its bicentenary at the time.

The exhibition presents a selection from the documentation gathered over several months: light phenomena occurring within the lighthouse itself and produced by the light it emits, as well as other phenomena connected with light and its absence in a place where the sun does not reach for two months of the year. The experience of the lighthouse is radiant: flickering, scattering, reflections, afterimages. Looking after the lighthouse became a ritual of keeping watch. The recurring flash, visible from a great distance, does more than mark a position on the map. It suggests that someone else is there in the darkness – a watcher or traveller for whom the light remains a sign of a distant presence.

The title evokes the hospitality and warmth that come not only from light but also from the presence of another person. It is taken from a line in a verse by Goethe, which he placed beneath a depiction of his home. In the extreme conditions of the far north, for most of the year, survival requires not only light, warmth and shelter, but also a sense of community.

The project was created during the modernisation of Norwegian lighthouses, which brought the era of Fresnel apparatuses and elaborate optical systems dating back to the 19th century to an end. As more efficient technologies take their place, these systems are gradually disappearing from the places for which they were designed. Siarek does not, however, create a nostalgic monument to a bygone era of engineering. Instead, he seeks to capture light in its countless forms of physical presence, recreating at IFF an experience that can no longer be encountered in its original setting.