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Learning with ghosts: Lucille Leger & Jacques-Marie Ligot
Each year Triennale invites emerging artists to conceive and carry out a residency in movement to be part of the European program “fed” by a network of the European platform LINA cultural agents. Travel is the raw material for an exercise in observation: experiencing territorial diversity, reducing distances, and extending boundaries are key elements of these residencies.
by Learning with Ghosts
Periple Duet is an invitation to travel differently, to go against the speed of air travel transportation, and to accept another temporality—slower, less smooth, where the body becomes more vulnerable. In this stretched duration, the residents articulate a territory, weave ties with institutions, and also build a form of framework for this journey, by linking the different points offered to them.
We were invited to leave our home in Paris to reach Lisbon and from there Ireland, beginning our residency in the Portuguese capital. The route then transformed into a journey along the Atlantic façade—from south to north—following the coastlines. Passing through Marseille, then Madrid, Lisbon to Dublin, we chose to stay close to the maritime edge, by train, bus, and boat. This coastline—from the Portuguese coast to Galicia, through Brittany to Ireland—forms a marginal space we sought to cross and understand.
Guided by our research entitled Learning with Ghosts, we aim to understand how architecture is inhabited by symbolic specters—carrying beliefs that stem from vernacular forms of knowledge. These beliefs offer a unique comprehension of places and buildings, sometimes contradicting their established uses, or on the contrary, enriching the understanding of certain architectures.
In focusing on ghosts, we are, through this journey, relating to the history of luminous devices and disciplines linked to the invisible—characteristic of the late 19th century. At that time, specific programs were launched to study the fields of specters, bacteria, electricity— all forms of knowledge attempting to link the invisible to the real. Today, we wish to extend that link to the notion of affect.
Our attention turned to lighthouses—or rather, to maritime signaling devices: faroles, lighthouses, casas de luz, which are direct testimonies of that era. Technical structures built to guide, control, and mark maritime space, their mass deployment in the 19th and 20th centuries accompanied the transformation of trade routes, the intensification of flows, but also the colonial logics of conquest and domination of the seas. With the help of the Irish Architecture Foundation and Architecture at the Edge, our journey along Ireland’s coast became an opportunity to forge meaningful connections. We met with lighthouse managers, sailors, architects, and a diverse community of lighthouse enthusiasts, which enriched our understanding of these coastal structures as both functional and symbolic sites.
These architectures are instruments: they enable the extension of human presence into hostile zones. They guarantee a form of visibility and control in uncertain conditions. In this sense, they participate in a political and technical narrative of the occupation of margins, of the territorial organization of the world through trade and navigation. Today, as their role is greatly diminished by the digitization of navigation, these objects have become cultural heritages, poetic motifs, sometimes touristic monuments, whose function and preservation are often questioned in the territories we crossed. Linked to observation devices, lighthouses are landmarks that join a multitude of architectures scattered across territories deeply marked by maritime heritage: port infrastructures, wind-swept agricultural landscapes, granitic geologies... All these elements contribute, in a way, to the formation of a shared architectural culture.
Tied together by Celtic culture, these coasts are scattered with numerous visual markers: menhirs, cairns, and other dry stone fortified structures that we encountered during our journey. Objects of fascination, seen as alien by the first inhabitants who watched them rise in their isolated territories, lighthouses now punctuate the daily life of people who, over time, have built stories and developed personal relationships with these places. As we traveled, each lighthouse we encountered—at sea, along the coast, or in cities—became the point of entry for a broader study. We consulted archives (those of the Commissioners of Irish Lights in Dublin), reviewed meteorological data, and visited the structures themselves. We sought to understand their architecture, but also the gestures they imply: to watch, maintain, wait, transmit, or anticipate. These are gestures recounted by those who lived there as keepers, users, or surrounding inhabitants.
These houses of light can be read as interfaces between the human body and larger systems: ocean currents, climate regimes, lunar cycles, optical technologies, logistic chains. What defines them isn’t just their architecture, but above all their signal: light, sound, rhythm. They are perceived from afar, intermittently, through mist and darkness. They guide as much as they unsettle. In a way, they are architectures of specters. By exploring life conditions in lighthouses before they were automated, we observed how they imposed strict alternations: day/night, watch/sleep, light/darkness. They impose a particular regime of attention, and point of view. The diaries of lighthouse keepers—like Armen by Jean-Pierre Abraham —show how living with a lamp is a physical and mental commitment, a solitude punctuated by the maintenance of light. Keeping watch in a lighthouse, like life itself, consisted of multiple maintenance tasks that remind us of the need to care for architecture to prevent its sudden degradation.
Lighthouses seem to express a junction between two worlds: one of a more direct relation to the environment, rooted in experience and sensation, marking economic and social activities—and the other of modern world organization, where technology detaches from human metabolic rhythms and disarticulates time. Surveillance technologies, remote work, and social networks are a few examples of this deregulation. The evolution of light infrastructures in public spaces reveals how our relationship with the climate and with sleep has been reshaped to keep us in a state of constant wakefulness. Although lighthouses maintain a connection to the disjointed and nonlinear experience of time—due to its bond with climatic uncertainties—they also express a profound upheaval in the organization of human activity, through an increasingly mechanized and arbitrary system. Lighthouses may be among the first manifestations of architecture’s ability to overcome darkness, thus opening a field of possibilities for conquering time, abolishing the tacit rule of night’s dominance over human activity.
Like Jonathan Cray explained in his book 24/7*1, these systems, which we’ve grown accustomed to in our contemporary world, constrain the experience of temporal variation and break the link with life’s rhythmic and periodic textures. Like other 19th-century optical instruments, lighthouses mark a transformation of subjectivity itself, at a time when the figure of the observer entered aesthetic, scientific, and philosophical spheres. This subtle revolution in Western visual culture accompanied the rise of the society we have come to know today, where our biological rhythms have been transformed by technologies that impose constant vigilance. The light of the lighthouse speaks to us because its rhythm so clearly matches the alternation of day and night, and invites us to acknowledge our own rhythms, and to rethink the necessary relationship between architecture and its context.
“Why does the sight of a lamp lit in broad daylight send a chill through the heart?”*2
After almost one month of traveling, we held a public workshop with the Irish Architecture Foundation in Dublin. We presented an archive of perpetual calendars and different types of circular guiding tools we gathered along the way. Using the circular tools as a framework, they mapped out their daily routines, hobbies and activities to create emotional landscapes - connecting personal affects, urban infrastructure and various environmental elements such as climate.
This is how the idea of creating a device as the result of residency emerged: a rotating disk, a circular map, a centerless plan. This medium allows for the layering of different types of information, reflecting both the concerns of lighthouse keepers and our own, as people in transit.
These circular, endlessly-turnable objects allow us to tell the story of our journey and research in a non-linear manner, inviting others to build their own relationship to the lighthouse lexicon we’ve developed here.
By turning the wheel, a choreographic lecture of the lighthouse emerges — as if its plans became a gesture score. This object draws inspiration from the architecture, living conditions, and environments we observed during our trip. Like an onion or a navigational tool, it has multiple ways to unfold. It can become the tool for an inhabitant to navigate in their own complex, multilayered landscape.
Each "cycle" tells a different aspect of the research and journey:
– corporal rhythms: sleep and dreams
– the keeper’s timed activities: cycles of work and rest
– the imprint of body on architecture: movements induced by the layout, energy emitted by bodies (temperature, humidity), maintenance gestures and everyday activities
– zones of light radiation and sound signal (fog horn): the lighthouse’s relationship to fog and night allows us to explore the influence of architecture beyond its material presence.
– the symbiotic relationship between interior domestic/work space and the outsid
- the keepers' activities connected to external alterations in the weather (wind, tides, waves, climate, visibility, temperature, humidity...)
- finally, one cycle works like a calendar, illustrating the month-long journey, which can then be reappropriated by the users of this object.
Periple Duet is a series of residencies on the move, as part of the European LINA programme, which invites emerging artists to immerse themselves in an exercise in observation, creating an itinerary and a theme that unites the city where they come from and Lisbon. In this series of travelogues, launched in 2023, the artists embark on a journey that serves as the basis for a reflection on architecture and landscape, addressing the notions of border, fluidity, displacement and heritage.