In 2012, I was commissioned to design an exhibit for Portsmouth’s Victorian Festival. The show revolved around the haunting story of a man consumed by an obsession to reconnect with his deceased lover. This man—an eccentric inventor named Professor Zuccato—traveled the world, delving into diverse rituals and spiritual traditions to deepen humanity’s relationship with the dead. His ultimate goal: to build a machine that could bridge the gap between life and the afterlife.
The exhibit was staged in a large gallery space usually dedicated to maritime history, with glass cases displaying ship models and seafaring relics. To reimagine the environment, we installed partition walls showcasing photographs, designs, and journal entries that traced Zuccato’s journey. Among the displays was a large wooden model ship, which we transformed into an interactive piece illustrating Zuccato’s perilous voyage across stormy seas—a metaphor for his inner turmoil and relentless pursuit.
At the heart of the exhibit stood the centerpiece of his life's work: the Obscura. A strange and enigmatic machine, said to bring its users into contact with the liminal space just beyond death. Drawing from World War I-era engineering and adapted 1940s technology, we collaborated with a group of artists to bring the Obscura to life through projection mapping and a series of kinetic, otherworldly devices. The result was an uncanny fusion of history and the supernatural—an installation that captivated the imagination of its viewers.
Over two days, more than 400 people visited the exhibit, including many families and children.
Process
At the time, I had just left my job as a nurse and was thinking deeply about the ways people relate to death—and the dead. That introspection gradually turned out - inny to the outies. One improbably sunny day in Manchester (it’s never sunny in Manchester), I stumbled upon an old printing press attributed to someone named Zuccato.
It turned out Zuccato was a real Italian inventor who registered numerous patents for unusual devices. The more I researched, the more I imagined a version of him grieving—perhaps unmoored by the loss of someone he loved—using the only tools he had to try and bring them back. From this emerged a story: a man, driven not just by grief but by the desire to transcend it. A man who circled the globe, learning from cultures that had their own ways of communing with the dead.
Thus was born Professor Zuccato's Obscura—an imaginative reconstruction of a life consumed by love, loss, and the blurred boundaries between the living and the beyond.