The Poblenou neighborhood becomes this weekend an open-air museum with light installations spread throughout its length and width. The Llum BCN festival fuses art and technology to create immersive installations, with light as the protagonist, that will make the visiting public reflect on themes such as climate change or artificial intelligence. In total, Barcelona residents will be able to enjoy more than thirty light installations between Friday, February 7 and Sunday, February 9, created by fifteen national and international artists and seventeen art and design schools in the city.
The works have been selected by the artistic direction of Maria Güell and the international curatorship of Martin Pošta, co-founder of the Signal Festival. The light installations are reinforced with the programming of the Llum Pro days, and OFF Llum, the proposals of local artists and collectives residing in the neighborhood by Poblenou Urban District.
Schedules and routes of the Llum BCN Festival
As a novelty of this edition, and with the aim of reducing queues and crowds, the schedules will be extended: Friday and Saturday, the facilities can be enjoyed until one in the morning, and on Sunday until eleven at night.The lighting installations will be freely accessible and free of charge. In addition, most of the lighting installations will be mainly located in outdoor spaces, with only four of them in enclosed spaces. The organization proposes four different itineraries to visit the different installations starting from different metro stops such as Glòries or Marina (L1), Bogatell, Llacuna or Poblenou (L4) and also by bus and tram.The essential installations
Filmmaker Isaki Lacuesta presents A Faint Retroactive Light/Tenue luz retroactiva. 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. Installed in the Oliva Artés space of the Barcelona History Museum (MUHBA), it is an immersive piece that invites reflection on perception and memory.This edition of the light festival is characterized by being the most multidisciplinary in its history. A characteristic that is reflected in the installation (De)construct, in the courtyard of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), which fuses dance, light, and sound, in an international collaboration between Germany, Spain, and France. (De)construct explores the tensions between memory and the present based on key historical moments of civil resistance, and proposes new interpretations of European identity.
"Why don't we repeat the origin of the world through supernatural tools such as artificial intelligence?". Based on this question, photographer Joan Fontcuberta has worked on his proposal Genesis.IA, a set of images created with artificial intelligence algorithms, such as Midjourney, Krea, or Stable Diffusion, based on the verses of Genesis about the creation of the world. The work is sponsored by Integrated Systems Europe (ISE), the world's most important audiovisual fair, which this week celebrated another record edition in Barcelona.
Set designer Laura Clos, who has participated in the festival twice as a student of design schools in Barcelona, now returns as a guest artist in the courtyard of the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya (TNC) with her unpublished 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 state of permanent alert with overstimulation, demands, and pressures that trap us in a chaotic cycle," reflected the set designer.
Additionally, the festival's program also highlights interactive installations, with which the public ceases to be a mere spectator, to become an active part of the works. In Josep Antoni Coderch square, visitors can play in a modern zoetrope, in the work Loop by Olivier Girouard, Jonathan Villeneuve & Ottoblix. After pulling the lever, images come to life inside these large circles, in a combination of light and color that evoke the first films in the history of cinema. Impulse, located in Pere IV at the height of Badajoz street, reinvents playground swings by incorporating lights and sounds so that children and adults rediscover the pleasure of playing and creating together. Each person who sits on one of these swings, with their movement, will activate a unique combination of light and musical notes, creating a collective symphony.
The climate crisis is one of the major themes the festival wanted to address, aiming to go beyond the visual experience and make the visiting public reflect. The Glòries Tower transforms into Okéanos, the Greek titan who personifies the ocean, to reflect how satellites capture radiation reflected by the sea surface. These reflections allow observing the conservation of marine life and the presence of polluting elements in the waters. The sea is also the protagonist of Rising, at the Auditori, which seeks to impact and generate climate awareness through the hypnotic beauty of water. Based on five glass lamps designed in collaboration with Murano artisans and developed with Barcelona LED technology, the work reflects the unstoppable increase in sea level due to climate change.
A 50-square-meter structure, built from scaffolding and LED lights, will dazzle at the Yamaha Light Meeting Point, in Josep Antoni Coderch square, with the NexusVision installation. A large structure, in the shape of an open ring that blurs the boundaries between architecture and sensory experience, created by Sara Gómez, Júlia Peñuela, Maria Selva and Mar Cerrato, students from l'Escola Superior de Disseny ESDI-Sabadell, in collaboration with Yamaha.
Beyond light: gastronomy and professional conferences
Beyond these lighting proposals, the festival also seeks to offer its visitors, which in its previous edition totaled more than 240,000 people over its three days, a total experience to enjoy Poblenou. Llum BCN is complemented by a long list of gastronomic proposals from all over the world, not only in the Westfield Glòries shopping center, but also with foodtrucks located around Glòries square.This year's edition also reinforces its professional aspect, with the Llum BCN Pro day, on Saturday February 8 from 11 am in the DHUB auditorium. This day aims to become a space for reflection and exchange between creators and future professionals and will include performative conferences by Antoni Arola and the Playmodes collective. Poblenou Urban District also offers an alternative route to the thirty installations of the festival, with up to eleven proposals from eleven emerging artists and local studios that are part of the creative community of Poblenou. This year's edition includes installations, performances and immersive experiences created by names such as Indissoluble, blit.y Razzmatazz or BeatMe Lab Studio, among others.