Light arts Festival from 3 to 5th February : Llum Barcelona 2023
Poblenou lights up for three exceptional nights every February, trying out various ways of imagining the city of tomorrow. The Llum Barcelona 2023 light arts festival, one of the most important events on Barcelona’s cultural calendar, will once again be bringing tens of thousands of city residents together in streets and squares, around the works of creators in every field, ranging from contemporary art to design and architecture, and from technology to design and lighting.
Each edition of Llum BCN is a big festive public event. It is also a collective experiment in perception and participation, and an urban lab where we explore how we might contemplate and live in our shared territory, the city, from new, previously unknown perspectives.
SHOW MORE OF THE MAIN TEXTAn event that looks at our closest surroundings cannot ignore the more immediate crises that stalk us, such as our changing relationship with energy, nor the major crises in the background, such as climate change. The festival projects offer responses to collective challenges, with new tools and ways of doing things. This edition’s projects propose new energy-self-sufficient post-carbon urban icons, such as Another Moon from the Korean collective Kimchi and Chips, a “second moon” that will float above Poblenou Central Park, sketched by lasers powered only by solar energy. Thijs Biersteker from the Netherlands, one of the European artists who is most effectively using technologies to produce new imaginaries for the energy transition, calls on the air in We Harvest Wind, an interactive kinetic sculpture powered by wind power.
Re-Generation, project by IAAC INSTITUT D’ARQUITECTURA AVANÇADA DE CATALUNYA
The air that floats above Barcelona will be the setting for other festival projects, such as Atmospheric Lighthouse, a real-time visualisation of everything invisible in the city’s atmosphere, and which will turn the skin of Glòries Tower into a large sail. A few metres away, at the DHUB, Abel Korinsky and Orhan “aib” Kavrakoglu will be presenting Call Out, a giant light matrix that traces the orbits of satellites which, at the same time, cross Barcelona’s sky a few kilometres above our heads.
