Glōm is an experimental short film exploring our evolving relationship with darkness. Focused on a pond in Berlin’s Görlitzer Park, it asks how the increasing brightness of our cities at night threatens to reshape green and aquatic spaces, and widen the void between urbanity and wildness.
Established on the former grounds of Görlitzer Bahnhof in the late 1980s, Görlitzer Park has long been framed as a problem park in media and political discourse through its associations with drug use, violence, and targeted racialised policing. In 2024 and 2025, the city of Berlin began implementing a controversial redevelopment plan to transform Görlitzer Park into a ‘Musterpark’ (model park), by increasing artificial lighting and building a perimeter fence. These measures, while presented as solutions to public safety concerns, have sparked significant opposition from locals, who argue that the plans risk pushing crime into the surrounding neighbourhoods, will drastically restrict free access to the park, and endanger the area’s already fragile nocturnal ecosystems.
Artificial light at night (ALAN), in particular, poses a well-documented threat to nocturnal urban ecologies. It disrupts circadian rhythms, disorients species that depend on natural darkness, and destabilises delicate interspecies relationships. The pond in Görlitzer Park can be seen as the lungs of the park. In addition to other bodies of water in Berlin, it cools the city by absorbing intense levels of heat generated by concentrated energy usage, known as the heat island effect. The pond is also rich in wildlife, hosting numerous aquatic species, amphibians, insects, and birds, and attracting small mammals such as foxes and raccoons for its source of drinking water. All are, in some way, shaped by the natural rhythms of day and night, light and dark.
Glōm asks: What forms of agency might the pond itself exert?
If we could listen, what would it say?
Full video release soon…
Written & Directed By: Jeremy Knowles // 3D Designer & Animator: Helena Napal // Voice Actor: Roisin Brehony // Original Music: Jonathan Knowles // Concept Development: Dr. Jorge Martín Sainz de los Terreros and Dr. Nona Schulte-Römer // Sound Design: Jeremy Knowles and Jonathan Knowles // Sound Recording: Josh Spriggs // Production Assistant: Helena Napal // Production support provided in partnership with The Ontario College of Art & Design
Archival Materials
Deutsche Fotothek, FHXB Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum, Landesarchiv Berlin, Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection, Museum Lichtenberg, National Gallery of Art – Washington DC, Paris Musées Collections, Prelinger Archives, Rijksmuseum, Städel Museum – Frankfurt am Main, Trustees of the British Museum, Wellcome Collection
Many Thanks
André Wunstorf, PD Dr. Franz Hölker, Prof. Ignacio Farías, Jochen Krautwald, Lainey Molloy, Magdalena Buchczyk, Dr. Sibylle Schroer, Sophia Linden