Dazzling installations will illuminate the Poblenou neighborhood from February 7 to 9 in a new edition of the Llum BCN festival. The festival merges art and technology to create immersive artistic installations with light as the protagonist. A play of lights that, accompanied by other artistic disciplines such as dance or photography, makes the visiting public reflect on themes such as climate change, artificial intelligence, or individuality. In total, Barcelona residents will be able to enjoy more than thirty light installations, created by fifteen national and international artists and seventeen art and design schools in the city.
The Llum BCN festival, born in 2012 around the Santa Eulàlia festivities in Barcelona, celebrates fourteen editions illuminating the city. The festival's artistic director, Maria Güell, celebrates that, throughout its editions, Llum BCN has managed to consolidate itself as "a benchmark festival" nationally and internationally and has "an increasingly enthusiastic audience." Last year, 240,000 people visited the festival over three days. As a novelty this edition, and with the aim of reducing queues and crowds, the hours will be extended: on Friday and Saturday, installations can be enjoyed until one in the morning and on Sunday until 11 at night. In addition, so that the public can move freely, the works will be installed mainly in outdoor spaces, and only four of the more than thirty installations will be housed in indoor spaces.
"We have always wanted to build a show with its own identity, that avoids franchises and favors original commissions," remarked Xavier Marcè, Councilor for Culture and Creative Industries, at the festival's presentation. The vast majority of pieces in this edition are unpublished works promoted by the festival with local and international artists and schools in the city. Among the proposals, those by renowned artists such as filmmaker Isaki Lacuesta, photographer Joan Fontcuberta, or set designer Laura Clos stand out.
Isaki Lacuesta, winner of the Gaudí Award for Best Director alongside Pol Rodríguez for Segundo premio, will present A Faint Retroactive Light/Tenue luz retroactiva at the Barcelona History Museum (MUHBA). An audiovisual installation that fuses the electronic music of Ylia and the voice of Alondra Bentley with classic video art from the 70s and 80s. It is an immersive piece that invites reflection on perception and memory.
Photographer Joan Fontcuberta will take over the DHUB facade to present his work Genesis.IA. The piece is born from the purpose of "creating light from darkness, creating images from a black box like artificial intelligence," Fontcuberta explained. "If artificial intelligence is capable of creating images, why don't we go to the origin of creation? Why don't we repeat this creation through supernatural tools like artificial intelligence?" With this objective, the artist has created images, using artificial intelligence tools, with the verses of Genesis about the creation of the world. In addition, the artist has recorded these verses in multiple languages --- from Catalan to Japanese --- which will be reproduced simultaneously.
Set designer Laura Clos, who has participated twice in the Llum BCN festival as a student from Barcelona design schools, now returns as a guest artist in the courtyard of the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya (TNC) with her unreleased work Traffic Jam Zoom. Six automobiles, with their strident lights and sounds, are the protagonists of this unsettling piece that allows us to reflect on the alienation of individuals in an accelerated society. "We live in a permanent state of alert with overstimulation, demands, and pressures that trap us in a chaotic cycle," the set designer reflected.
In addition to these proposals, pieces with climate emergency as the protagonist also stand out, in works such as Okéanos by Anna Rierola, through which the Glòries Tower will be submerged in the seabed, or Risin at L'Auditori, which metaphorically depicts the rise in sea level. Rosa Tharrats will transform the interior of the DHUB into a dreamlike space where light, movement, and fabrics will dialogue. The Fosfènica installation will transcend the festival and can be observed for six weeks inside the museum.
In total, more than thirty installations can be enjoyed in the most multidisciplinary edition of the Llum BCN festival, as the luminous pieces will interrelate with other artistic disciplines such as dance, photography, or scenography. On the other hand, to foster the city's emerging talent, Llum BCN will also feature seventeen works by design and art students from the city. During the festival, a committee of experts will visit these works and award three Young Talent Awards.
In this year's edition of Llum BCN, under the artistic direction of Maria Güell and the international curatorship of Martin Pošta ---co-founder of the Signal Festival---, the organizers also want to reinforce the different lines of the festival beyond these luminous proposals, such as its professional aspect, with Llum Pro, or OFF Llum, which features a program of eleven local artists and studios organized by Poblenou Urban District.