Night Visions
Adelaide Botanic Gardens
Wed 16 July, 2025
Illuminate Adelaide is in its fifth year and if the crowds meandering down North Terrace and through the Botanic Garden last night are any indication the event is going from strength to strength. There is something quite magical about this event that brings masses of people of all ages out on to city streets on cold winter nights. And crowds aside, events like this deliver their own brand of magic.
Night Visions is this year’s flagship event. Set in the Botanic Garden, and beginning at the gardens’ main gates on North Terrace it leads people through a wonderland of sight and sound among the transformed paths, trees, and garden landmarks and transports you to another reality. People who are familiar with the garden by day will enjoy trying to work out where they are but will also revel in the fact that the once familiar can be so new and transfixing.
Night Visions consists of a number of installations with a theme, a particular light/image focus, and accompanying soundtrack. These installations tend to bleed into each other so that your senses are keenly tuned to what’s coming further down the path. Each installation has been conceived and designed by renowned local and international audiovisual artists and composers. Themes addressed or implied include the influence of the urban environment on the natural world, the intersection of technology and the forest, and the symbolic significance of the sunrise.
An amazing play of light across the emptiness projects huge faces high up in the trees, beams of light shoot across your path at different angles and in changing colours. They swirl and swoop and sweep across the landscape in tune with specifically designed soundscapes. Bells ring out changes of light and colour. A tunnel of light with swirling mist lures you down a hypnotic path.
In the Bicentennial Conservatory, coloured beams of light rise from beneath the walkway directly into your path and it feels like you’re walking through upside down coloured rain. The word hallucinogenic did come to mind! It felt so real. I actually saw some people swaying from side to side trying to avoid vertical beams of light so they couldn’t touch them.
This kind of event allows you, if you want, to disconnect from reality for a while and enter a fantasy world that has nothing to do with normal life. It’s a retreat into sonorous enchantment where light and sound and nature collaborate, a stroll through an alternative universe where you don’t need to talk or do anything (though of course hundreds of photos were taken) but absorb the experience. Just be. Feel. Sense. Smile. And at the end of it all, real life just feels better 🙂
Michael Coghlan
Night Visions continues nightly at the Adelaide Botanic Gardens until Sun 20 July.
