Bat Box

The Bat House is a spatial installation conceived as a functional habitat for bats, developed during Jasmina Cibic’s early investigations into systems of display, camouflage, and environmental staging. The work examines how architecture mediates relationships between visibility and concealment, protection and spectacle, nature and urban development.

The structure adopts the language of modernist architecture — a clean geometric framework suggestive of rationalist utility — yet its mirrored surface destabilises its own presence. Reflecting fragments of sky, vegetation, and industrial surroundings, the object appears to dissolve into the landscape, functioning simultaneously as habitat and illusion: a structure that both announces and erases itself.

Originally installed on Walthamstow Marshes, a wildlife reserve bordering the redevelopment zone of the London 2012 Olympic Games, the work emerged at a moment when ecology, urban regeneration, and state spectacle became tightly intertwined. The Olympic transformation of East London mobilised the language of sustainability and public improvement alongside large-scale processes of spatial control and extraction. Positioned at the edge of this shifting territory, The Bat House reflects on the uneasy coexistence between ecological preservation and the image-making machinery of contemporary urban development.

The bat itself becomes an allegorical figure within the work: a nocturnal species surviving through forms of adaptive invisibility. By constructing a habitat that visually disappears into its surroundings, Cibic foregrounds the instability of perception and questions what forms of visibility are permitted within managed landscapes.

Photographed later against the winter sky, the structure assumes the presence of an ambiguous monument — part shelter, part decoy, part reflective device. Suspended between sculpture and camouflage, The Bat House anticipates many of the concerns that continue throughout Cibic’s practice: the staging of environments, the politics embedded within architecture, and the uneasy relationship between care, visibility, and power.