Feminist City Light Capers

Caroline Alexander, Cynthia Imogen Hammond and Shauna Janssen

Feminist City Light Capers began in 2017, out of a question we could not quite let go of: what would it mean to actually want to be outside, together, after dark in places that potentially signal risk? For years, we have been staging small, temporary interventions with light and reflective surfaces in Montréal, Connecticut, and Birmingham — each one a kind of experiment, an occasion to notice how women and gender-diverse people move through public space, and how we are seen within it. We are curious about visibility in all its forms: when it protects us, when it exposes us, and how much of what we call "self-presentation" at night is really just a negotiation with fear.

The deeper question underneath all of this is about safety, and who gets to feel it. The night does not look the same to everyone — it shifts shape depending on your body, your gender, your race, your class, your age, how you move, who you love. We wanted to sit inside that ambivalence rather than resolve it, so we started going out at night with light — lanterns, projectors, whatever we could carry — into places we wanted to occupy, even briefly. Small, playful, temporary gestures. What happens if we treat the dark not as something to fear or defend against, but as raw material — something we can shape, light up, and briefly make our own? For us, that question became a way of insisting, out loud and in public, on our right to a place and a time we are so often told is not ours to claim.

The Moon Light Short Beach Caper

We have carried this question into a number of different places over the years. Most recently, in 2022, at the 30th annual last-full-moon-of-summer skinny dip at Short Beach, Connecticut, I made 25 transparent, illuminated swim caps so that swimmers would be visible in the dark water at night. Over 100 women took part, ranging in age from 16 to 99, and watching their lit caps scatter across the ocean like a small constellation is something I do not think I will forget. There was so much joy in it — bodies of every age, swimming freely and without shame, after dark, together. I found myself thinking about how rarely women are given permission to take up space this way at night, let alone to be seen doing it without apology. The caps made each swimmer both anonymous and completely unmistakable at once, which felt like exactly the tension we keep circling back to: how do we become visible on our own terms, rather than someone else's? This was also the moment the project found its way into something older than any single performance of ours — a long-running community ritual, decades deep, that we were lucky enough to be folded into rather than invent ourselves.

The Birmingham Canal Caper

By the mid-twentieth century, as the canals fell out of commercial use, they became something else again: dark, forgotten, in-between places, made worse by post-war planning that turned its back on pedestrians and cut whole neighbourhoods off from the water with confusing underpasses and abandoned towpaths. It was out of this neglect that women's activism in Birmingham took shape — groups like the Birmingham for People's Women's Group spent decades, from the 1960s into the 1990s, conducting their own safety audits, insisting that the people planning these spaces reckon with who actually felt unsafe in them. Walking that same canal in our lit-up coats, so many years later, I felt like we were picking up a conversation that had never really finished. The canal has been regenerated since — cafés, lighting, the whole vocabulary of "eyes on the street" — and it is undeniably more inviting now. But I still wonder how much of that safety is real, and how much is simply the appearance of it, dressed up for a very different, more commercial kind of visitor. That question, unresolved, is the ground we were walking on that night.

The Shearer Tunnel Caper

Going back further, to 2018, we found a very different kind of history in an abandoned tunnel in Point-Saint-Charles, Montréal. This is a neighbourhood with its own long memory of activism, much of it carried by women, and we wanted to respond to one chapterof it: the Shearer Tunnel. For years, it offered hundreds of women a shortcut to work at the Bell Telecom company on the other side of the tracks. It was also, by every account, a place to be afraid of — dark, foul-smelling, and known as somewhere men would wait for women and girls. In the 1980s, women from the Pointe Action Committee fought to have it closed, and after nearly a decade of pushing the city, they succeeded

We went out on a bitterly cold winter night with lights and reflective materials — a white umbrella, a small projector — to make a temporary, commemorative mark on both sides of where the tunnel used to be. We projected old images of the tunnel onto the concrete, brick, and plywood that now seal its entrances, along with fragments of memory from people who used to pass through it. And then, almost as part of the piece itself, we walked the new route those women had won — safer, yes, but much longer, the only way through now that the tunnel is gone. Walking it ourselves, I kept thinking about what that trade-off really costs, in a body, over years: the extra minutes, the extra distance, paid daily, in exchange for not having to be afraid. It does not feel like a fair trade, even when it is the right one.

A few years earlier, in 2019, Birmingham asked something harder of us. There, I made illuminated coats by sewing fairy lights inside transparent raincoats, and the three of us wore them one evening as we walked along the canal at the centre of the city. We chose this site knowingly. Birmingham's canals carry a long history of hardship that felt impossible to separate from the questions we were already asking. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, women and children did much of the canal's unrecognized labour, and the canal side itself was a rough, largely unpoliced world — poverty, pollution, crime clustered around the dockside pubs, and towpaths that were genuinely dangerous for the women who lived and worked alongside them.

The Mont Royal Mountain Caper

Earlier that same year, Mont Royal gave us something we were not expecting at all. It is a park sitting right at the heart of the city, and one January night we went up with lanterns, sparklers, and small pot lights, ready to meet the kind of isolating darkness we had encountered elsewhere. Instead, we found the mountain lit from every direction we had not planned for — the glow of the city below, moonlight and starlight catching on fresh snow — so that our own small lights felt less like a defiance of the dark and more like a continuation of it. And we were not alone. Other people were out too, walking, skiing, gathered in small clusters, and the whole evening took on an atmosphere closer to a shared midwinter ritual than to the wary, solitary navigations that had shaped our other sites.

I think about that night often, because it complicated something I had assumed going in. Darkness and safety are not simply about how much light there is, or how many people are around; they depend on a whole quiet architecture of design, use, sightlines, and season that can tip just as easily toward ease as toward risk. That night, carrying our small lights into the mountain's much larger glow, we were not so much transforming the space as being welcomed into a nocturnal life that, for once, was already generous.

The Hochelaga-Maisonneuve Bridge Caper

And at the very beginning, in 2017, on an unlit bike path in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve we wrapped ourselves in reflective emergency blankets and tied more reflective material to the chain-link fence running alongside a bridge, hoping to catch and throw back whatever little light there was. This was where the project started, before we had a name for what we were doing. Montréal is proud of its more than 350 kilometres of bike paths, and most of them really are well lit. But the ones that are not carry a different reputation — sites, more than once, of violence against women — and that reputation changes how people move through the city, quietly, in ways that rarely get named. Some people simply will not ride those stretches, choosing longer routes instead, even when it means leaving the bike path network altogether.

We picked one such place: a narrow bridge, about 125 feet long, crossing over the Canadian National railway tracks, boxed in on both sides by chain-link fencing. After dark, it holds almost no light of its own — just the spill from a nearby billboard, and the occasional flicker of headlights passing beneath it. We went out in the fall, when the trees along the path had already dropped their leaves; in spring and summer, we knew, the same bridge disappears under a thick canopy and grows even darker still. Standing there, wrapped in light-catching reflective silver security blankets, claiming this narrow, fenced-in crossing for a little while, we passed a few other cyclists moving through — quick, unplanned witnesses to the small, strange thing we were making of a place most people just want to get across as fast as they can.

Looking back now, from the beach to the bridge, I do not think what we made was ever really one argument. It feels more like five separate conversations with the same unanswered question: what happens when we choose to meet the night, instead of avoiding it? Some nights confirmed exactly what we feared. Others surprised us with how much ease was already there, waiting. And some left me sitting with a kind of grief, for everything earlier generations of women had to fight for and still lose along the way. What has not changed, through any of it, is the practice itself: going out together, with whatever light we could carry, and seeing what the dark would let us make of it.

Photograph by Cynthia Imogen Hammond, Shauna Janssen, Lisa Graves and myself. Parts of the descriptive text about FCLC draws upon an unpublished conference paper by Hammond and Janssen, “Desiring in the Dark: Feminist Scenographies, The City, and the Night” at the Ironbridge International Institute for Cultural Heritage University of Birmingham, UK, in partnership with the Collaborative for Cultural Heritage and Management Policy, University of Illinois, USA, and the Department of Ethnology/Critical Heritage Studies Network, University of Stockholm, Sweden, 2019