What Daan Roosegaarde is breeding in Bali

When Daan Roosegaarde was a boy, he stared upward more than most, I think. Clouds were an obsession of his – vast but shifting, formations that could never be held in place, always mutating into new shapes; they were one of his earliest sources of wonder. Even though he might not have understood the concept at the time, I imagine it unconsciously taught him about impermanence early on.

After looking at the clouds during the day, lying in bed at night he stared at the ceiling of his childhood room. Like so many of us, he had those glow-in-the-dark stickers of stars and moons, the faint green-yellowish shapes that shined dimly until long after you fell asleep. Roosegaarde suspects he looked at them a little ‘too long’ as a kid, “because that would explain a lot about who I am and what I do,” he laughed while introducing himself at his presentation during Silk Road Chapter 02 in Bali. He still finds the plastic shapes fascinating: “They charge during the day and they glow at night. No battery, no solar panel, no energy bill. It’s sort of nature.”

Those memories are now more than nostalgia, they formed a path for what came later. Roosegaarde has a deep rooted urge to study systems that sustain themselves, that seem magical but are in fact deeply material, and to keep chasing after natural phenomena – folding them back into design and technology to create the most interesting, new experiences. “If we can imagine it, we can create it,” he said during his talk.

You have to be obsessed to make something magical happen.

Designer, artist, architect, inventor – none of them quite capture it all. “Slash, slash, slash. And slash, I don’t care about labels,” he once remarked. The point is elsewhere: a sense of curiosity, finding out where wonder lies, using imagination as a tool.

Breeding light

That logic is now alive in Bali. For the past three years, Roosegaarde and a group of Balinese collaborators have been breeding fireflies. Two decades ago, the island’s nights glowed with them. Today, construction, pesticides, and light pollution have nearly erased their presence. The Firefly Garden, as the project is called, is currently an extensive research site in Canggu. Thousands of larvae are being bred and nurtured – it takes close to ten months for a firefly to grow from egg to adult and they need to be fed every two days. Now, each week again, around fifty new insects emerge in the breeding hub, beginning their brief twenty-two days of life. “In that short time, the biggest challenge for a firefly is to find a mate,” Roosegaarde explained. “When they like each other, they start to synchronize their light, so light is their source to find each other and to propopulate themselves.”

The overall ambition is to create conditions in which fireflies can return and don’t have to be bred. Not at all as staged ‘little light show’ entertainment in a beautiful garden, but as proof of environmental repair. “When fireflies are around, you know the habitat is good [for you],” Roosegaarde said. “That is because fireflies need clean soil, clean water, and clean air. When they are not part of the climate, you know there’s still work to do in that area.”

If we can imagine it, we can create it.

Roosegaarde is someone that acknowledges we live in a time when the headlines are dominated by crises – accelerating climate change, polluted air, disappearing species, fragile ecosystems under constant pressure. “Of course there are many things beyond my scope of influence,” he said, “but the question then becomes: what can I do? What can I actually do instead of doing nothing?”

Translating wonder into systems

The fireflies are only the latest chapter in a body of work that keeps circling back to a similar impulse: using light as both medium and measure. In Brabant, a province in the Netherlands, the Van Gogh Path transformed a bicycle trail into a glowing constellation of stones, lit by pigments that store daylight and shimmer at night – a contemporary echo of Vincent van Gogh’s famous artwork Starry Night [on view in MoMa New York]. With Waterlicht, he flooded landscapes with blue waves of light to simulate rising seas, immersing visitors in a future that is actually already on its way.

SPARK is another beautiful example of his highly inventive projects. Traditional fireworks, he thinks, are spectacular but destructive – chemical residue, deafening sound, frightened animals, risks of physical injury, and lasting pollution in the air, soil, and water. SPARK offers an alternative: clouds of silent, biodegradable lights drifting across the night air, resembling fireflies, flocks of birds, or whole galaxies. It has been staged from London to Singapore, and provokes a pressing thought: why should joy come at the expense of so much else?

Then there is the Smog Free Tower, a piece of environmental engineering disguised as art. It sucks polluted air through ionization, releasing cleaner air back into the city. The captured particles are compressed into small stones and turned into jewelry. “It’s a poetic reversal,” Roosegaarde once called it: toxins turned into keepsakes.

These projects of his design bureau, called Studio Roosegaarde, don’t just illustrate environmental problems – they actually build systems in which the situations can be felt, and also reimagined, reinvented or even reversed. His works are experiences first though, and ‘commentary’ second. And is there any better way to comment on things then by giving an alternative option? I’d argue there isn’t.

Obsession as method

Roosegaarde has a way of making obsession sound like common sense. “You have to be obsessed to make something magical happen,” he told us in Bali. It wasn’t a boast. It is a description of his process all along: chasing clouds, staring at glow-stars, standing in labs to test phosphorescent pigments, feeding larvae every two days. His practice is built on the things most people stop noticing.

He also told us about his grandfather, who confessed on his deathbed that he had always wanted to do something else with his life but had never allowed himself. “I realize now, that back then as a five-year-old, it was the first time I made a conscious decision as a human being: whatever I’m going to do, I’m not going to have regrets. I will mess up – big time probably, but I won’t regret not trying.”

It is an editorial stance as much as a personal one: better to attempt and fail than to spectate. Better to build a prototype than to write another policy paper. At Studio Roosegaarde they do not claim to solve the climate crisis, but with their works they do open a space in which different futures can be imagined – and once imagined, also (in part) created.

The magic of Bali

Bali, for Roosegaarde, is not only a site of production but most of all imagination. The island’s nature has become one of his new and favorite ‘laboratories’ over the past years, having staged a series of experiments there, each one using (a familiar fragment of) the landscape and shifting it into a new space that shows how science can create a world that you might thought was only possible in your dreams.

In Waves of Light for example, Roosegaarde made the waves of the Indian Ocean itself shimmer, with each swell illuminating in a bright blue color against the dark sky. On another part of the Indonesian island, a waterfall became Falls of Light, glowing indigo in the jungle night. Besides that, gardens and beaches were reimagined as glowing surfaces: flowers radiating at night and sand illuminated under the touch of a hand.

At the core of these projects is - as you can probably guess by now - Roosegaarde’s fascination with bioluminescence; the natural glow of algae, plankton, and other organisms that have lit seas and forests for millions of years. In Bali, Roosegaarde has been cultivating some of the world’s most light-emitting algae, being at awe on how they flicker to life at the slightest contact. “It’s living energy and one of the most beautiful things that exist,” he has said.

Fireflies and beyond

At Silk Road Chapter 02, Roosegaarde’s talk felt aligned with what we are trying to build at SILK: not just a platform for digital art, but a space that is created with vision and intent. While the presentation progressed, the audience leaned in, fully caught in his enthusiasm and rhythm. And when he fell silent, there was the sense that something unseen might glow into life at any second.

The Firefly Garden is going to be available for private tours and is not at all a commercial strategy by Roosegaarde. What matters for him is the act itself: breeding light back into a place where it once thrived. In doing so, Roosegaarde is not only reviving an insect. He is cultivating possibility, synchronizing wonder with responsibility. And perhaps that is what he has been breeding all along.

# → Watch the short film on The Firefly Garden here