Kunstverein Braunschweig, 2024
Photos: Patryk Kujawa

In a series of ceramic sculptures, I explore the firefly as a symbol of fragile ecologies, fleeting desire, and quiet resistance. Most of the fireflies are glazed in vibrant, luminous colors—drawing attention to their magical presence, their shimmer, their seductive glow. Some of them remain unglazed: pale, chalky, almost bone-like—more ghost than insect. Together, they inhabit a space between life and memory, presence and disappearance.

Fireflies speak a physical language. To send their signals, they burn part of their own body. They flash briefly into the night—searching for connection, for a mate, for a reply. Their light is a form of longing. Appearing, disappearing, appearing again. Always on the edge of being seen.

This glowing choreography reminded me of queer cruising: bodies moving through nighttime landscapes, often in silence, guided by glances, gestures, a flicker of recognition. Desire moving in the dark. Intimacy without identity. Both the firefly and the cruising figure become luminous beings—visible only for a moment before fading again into shadow.

However, these moments are vanishing. Light pollution erases the darkness fireflies need to communicate. At the same time, the glow of smartphones flattens the mystery of cruising into profile pictures and filtered desire.
Scientists say that we might be the last generation to witness fireflies lighting up the night.


These sculptures are a response to that disappearance. They are dreamlike and oversized—part insect, part relic, part queer monument. For me, they evoke the warm summer nights of my childhood, when fireflies turned the fields of my hometown into glowing maps of wonder. That world now feels distant, and the night skies are emptier.

But fireflies are also survivors. Insects have outlived countless planetary disasters. After the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the first living creatures seen among the ruins were fireflies. In their delicate light, there is both mourning and resilience.

In his 1975 essay La scomparsa delle lucciole (The Disappearance of Fireflies), Pier Paolo Pasolini used the fading of fireflies as a metaphor for the vanishing of dissenting, peripheral voices under the harsh floodlights of dominant ideology. For Pasolini, their disappearance marked a cultural and political loss—a silencing of what once glimmered quietly in the margins.

My fireflies carry that tension. They grieve what is being lost—ecologies, intimacies, ways of being—but they also resist. In their fragile glow is a form of insistence. A signal still sent. A quiet refusal to vanish.