What once flew

What Once Flew

What Once Flew by Kristoffer Hygum Nielsen, Frederik Göbel and Rikke Louise van Hauen has found a new home on the side of Illutron.

Originally exhibited at Roskilde Festival 2026 as part of a collaboration with the Fablab at Roskilde University, the work imagines the return of the Herorandøje, a butterfly species that became extinct in Denmark the same year Roskilde Festival began.

The work is rooted in a fascination with the contrast between nature’s ability to create extraordinary forms of life and humanity’s ability to destroy them. For more than 50 years, the Herorandøje has been absent from our world, alongside many other species that have disappeared.

In What Once Flew, the butterfly returns as a strange, human-made creature. Constructed from metal, light and mechanical movement, it is deliberately fragile, heavy and slightly uncanny. It does not attempt to recreate the butterfly as it once was. Instead, it appears as something transformed through human hands: a hybrid between nature and technology, the living and the constructed.

Its movement reflects this transformation. Rather than moving with the lightness of a living butterfly, it moves as a mechanical reconstruction of life, as if something extinct is attempting to return through the materials we have given it.

The work invites reflection on our relationship with nature and on the complexity of sustainability: what disappears while we continue with our everyday lives, what it means to try to restore what has already been lost, and what responsibility we have for the species with which we share the planet.

The work has now been curated into Illutron’s ongoing programme of light installations, where the barge is gradually being transformed into a glowing exhibition visible from the quay. The programme brings together existing works and new co-created installations, with an emphasis on energy efficiency, robustness, visibility from shore and, where possible, interaction.

Mounted high on the side of the ship, What Once Flew becomes part of Illutron’s changing nighttime silhouette: a luminous mechanical creature overlooking Refshaleøen and a new chapter in the work’s life.