Illumination [BGD-25]
experimental short film, 16 min
© Panic Film Limited 2025
Iluminacija [BGD-25] is an immersive experimental film created inside Belgrade’s abandoned “Snaga i Svetlost” power station. Developed during a five-week on-site residency, the film transforms an industrial ruin into a living, resonant body of sound and image. Through intimate cinematography and a score composed entirely from the building’s own sonified vibrations, the work invites viewers to experience architecture as memory, instrument, and latent future.
Once the beating heart of Belgrade’s electrification, the Snaga i Svetlost power station operated from 1932 to 1969 before falling into decades of silence. Today it stands as a vast, decaying monument — a place of technological memory, architectural scale, and unrealized potential.
Iluminacija / Illumination [BGD-25] was created by filmmaker Nik Panic, who lived inside the abandoned complex for five weeks, treating the building not as a backdrop but as an active collaborator. Moving slowly through its cavernous halls, shafts of light, and layers of dust, the camera traces the textures, geometries, and spectral presence of the site.
Sound plays a central role in the film. In collaboration with sound artist Sz. Berlin, more than 400 micro-sonic events were captured through a process of sonification, recording vibrations, resonances, and structural emissions from steel, concrete, glass, and rust. None of these sounds were digitally altered — the score is composed entirely from the building’s own acoustic fingerprint.
Neither purely documentary nor entirely abstract, Iluminacija / Illumination [BGD-25] occupies a hybrid space where architecture becomes narrative and ruin becomes a site of imagination. The film asks what remains alive inside industrial infrastructure that has long ceased to function — and what futures might still resonate within it
This film was developed as part of FASIH — Future Art Science Industrial Heritage, an art and research initiative exploring the relationship between industrial heritage, contemporary artistic practice, and scientific inquiry. Within this framework, Iluminacija / Illumination [BGD-25] investigates how abandoned infrastructures can be understood not only as relics of the past, but as dynamic spaces that continue to shape urban memory and future possibility.
I entered the power station not to document its decay, but to listen to what still resonates within it. By living inside the building for five weeks, I allowed its rhythms, textures, and silences to shape the film. Through unaltered sonified recordings, the structure itself becomes the composer. Iluminacija [BGD-25] is an attempt to make the invisible life of industrial architecture both audible and visible.
— Nik Panic
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