Decemberlicht

Art in the public realm

17 December 2024 until 5 January 2025


With Decemberlicht, the duo Kroft&Smids brings light to the dark days around Christmas and New Year's Eve by using projections at various locations in the city centre of Leeuwarden to transform buildings into places where stories are told in words or images. A poem on a bare wall, a beautiful quote on a monument, a facade that becomes a film screen…

Kroft&Smids consists of theatre director Karina Kroft and technical designer Remko Smids. When everything came to a standstill during the first Corona lockdown, they started projecting hopeful texts on buildings in and around Leeuwarden for seventy evenings. What started as a spontaneous action became a full-fledged project that resulted in a book being published. It did not stop with these projections.  

For example, Kroft&Smids created an ope…

With Decemberlicht, the duo Kroft&Smids brings light to the dark days around Christmas and New Year's Eve by using projections at various locations in the city centre of Leeuwarden to transform buildings into places where stories are told in words or images. A poem on a bare wall, a beautiful quote on a monument, a facade that becomes a film screen…

Kroft&Smids consists of theatre director Karina Kroft and technical designer Remko Smids. When everything came to a standstill during the first Corona lockdown, they started projecting hopeful texts on buildings in and around Leeuwarden for seventy evenings. What started as a spontaneous action became a full-fledged project that resulted in a book being published. It did not stop with these projections.  

For example, Kroft&Smids created an opening lead for all episodes of documentary series "Beklimmers van het vlakke lân" (climbers of the flat land) by Omrop Fryslân. They developed Praamverhalen, an audiovisual boat trip with projections on the quays and a story you hear using headphones. For the nine-day Groningen theatre festival Jonge harten, they projected a text onto a building in the city every night. For Nobel Week Lights in Stockholm at the end of 2022, they created a route with quotes from Nobel Prize winners.

And they created Decemberlicht, a light route through the dark streets of the city centre of Leeuwarden, a route that is now being continued.

TIP: Follow the blue lantern light....