Touring installation
ShadowLight
The Cattle Car Experience
Overview
An immersive, traveling museum exhibit built inside an actual railcar.
ShadowLight is a life-size replica of a 1940s German boxcar, built from the ground up. Inside, a 360-degree video projection covers all interior walls, immersing visitors in the stories of Holocaust survivors Nate Leipciger and Hedy Bohm.
On tour
From a park in Toronto to Times Square
Since 2020 the car has made hundreds of stops at schools, campuses, city halls and public squares across Canada and the US, including Times Square and the National Mall in Washington. The map shows some of them.
1locationsGuelph, ON2020
Inside
The projection
Inside the car, the story of two Holocaust survivors who endured a journey in a car very much like this one on the way to Auschwitz plays out. In 360 degrees, an immersive film surrounds the audience standing inside the car, sharing the stories of Hedy Bohm and Nate Leipciger.
Stepping In
The footprints
The first thing visitors notice are black footprints painted onto the wood beneath them — in a variety of sizes, suggesting the range of ages and the crowding that up to 150 people endured in these cars.
Groups of 25 stand inside as the stories of survivors unfold around them on every wall. Facts, figures, and numbers fade — but experiences remain.
The system
How it runs
Eight laser projectors hang from the ceiling, each one covering its own section of wall. Two computers in the middle of the car keep them playing in sync, and there's a speaker in each corner.
The content is split into one feed per projector and warped to fit the wood, so from the inside it reads as one continuous picture.