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FESTIVALS OF LIGHT / LUMIERE, DERRY-LONDONDERRY, NORTHERN IRELAND Photographs: Chris Hill
Cédric Le Borgne’s Travellers look out over the River Foyle. In human form, but with no features, the figures appeared to soar over Derry’s Peace Bridge.
LIGHTING THE WAY TO LEGEN-DERRY
Lumiere brought the curtain down on Derry’s barnstorming ‘City of Culture’ year. While bringing artists together, the festival also acted to further strengthen a healing community.
The resurgence of Derry in the wake of 1998’s Good Friday Agreement is one of the most inspiring stories to result from the end of The Troubles. The city is still very much living its history, although much has been consigned to the past, a place so full of significant stones with meaning to so many different factions, can still prompt tensions within the community. The city’s name is often given the ‘New York, New York, so good they named it twice’ treatment and is lengthened to Derry/Londonderry, in order to satisfy both sides of the divide. However, after it was used in a string of advertising campaigns, it is increasingly popular to dub the area simply ‘LegenDerry’, a sign of the city’s newfound canny ability to re-invent itself along unifying lines.
Culture has played a crucial role in this re-birth, a role strengthened further after it was announced that Derry would become the UK’s first ‘City of Culture’ in 2013. The yearlong programme of events attracted international attention due to the decision to hold the Turner Prize exhibition and announcement at Ebrington, the former British military installation, the one-time barracks transformed into art galleries, the gargantuan parade ground (bigger than Trafalgar Square) now a public piazza. The ‘City of Culture’ year was brought to a stunning conclusion by ‘Lumiere’, the Arti- choke organised light festival, fresh from a successful outing in Durham. The Trust fully embraced Derry’s complicated heritage and attempted to tackle it when compiling the programme.
One of the best examples of the artwork transcending history was ‘The Empty Plinth’ which projected an untainted beam of white light into the sky. Developed by Mark Lusby of the Holywell Trust and John Peto of the Nerve Centre, the work was placed on Walker’s Plinth, a memorial that sits on the Royal Bastion, midway along the Western Perspective of the Derry City Walls. The plinth used to hold a statue of the Rev. George Walker, the one-time joint governor of Derry during the Catholic Siege of the city in 1689, before it was dramatically blown up by the IRA in 1973. The site is still venerated by the Protestant Apprentice Boys of Derry and continues to be vandalised by Catholics when community tensions are running high. The fact that the light-artwork was even presented on the
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