“I imagined a landscape, a boat floating on the river, a presence that is, somehow, natural for a river. I wanted to add a gesture, a noisy fracture: a generator that nurtures strings of underwater fibre optic lights with its power; a bundle of optical fibres nestled in the mysterious, muddy depths of the Arno that try to bring light to the image of the river bottom.”

Lights to serve the night (2017) testifies to Adrian Paci’s long creative stay in Florence:
as a response to the invitation of the RIVA Project, the Albanian artist initially produced a performance along the river, then a video installation with the same name.
The floating skeleton of a boat trailing filaments of light that illuminate the surrounding environment recalls the performance experience that is poetically narrated in the video.
A paddler glides his small boat along the Arno; with slow, rhythmical movements, he also stirs the luminous wires plunged into the water of the river, searching for new lights and hidden meanings. The luminous trail illuminates the murky, mysterious bed of the Arno as if it were a poetic archaeological exploration of the river, revealing little and concealing much.
The silent rowing is broken by the noise of a generator that activates optical fibres; a noise that,
as in others of his works, is reminiscent of the generators that lit the houses in Albania, recreating a sort
of emotional soundscape.
“Lights to serve the night is an attempt to establish a dialogue between surfaces and depths, between light and dark; a dialogue ignited by man, who does not expect to resolve it, to reveal it, to bring everything
to knowledge.”
This work was produced by the RIVA Project and was exhibited for the first time at the Museo Novecento in the exhibit devoted to Paci, which also involved the Murate. It was later presented at the National Gallery of Arts in Tirana in 2019 for the first solo organised for Adrian Paci in his country before returning to Florence
on this occasion.