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FESTIVALS OF LIGHT / JOHAN MORITZ
Johan Moritz has devoted his career to lighting and continues to campaign to better the state of lighting design education. With the rising popularity of festivals of light, Moritz wonders if the fashion is undermining the craft.
EYE ON THE FUTURE
The debate in Derry continues to rage in the wake of 2013’s Lumiere festival as to whether ‘A Stitch in Time’ by Tim Etchells will remain as a permanent fixture. No installations were created with permanence in mind.
A Malmo, Sweden, native, I have been work- ing for the City for almost twelve years, both as a lighting designer, project manag- er, advisor and product designer. During this period I have been involved with a number of temporary lighting installations in the city, many of which have been shown during the Malmo Festival, a cultural feast held in the city every year.
Out of my work in Malmo, ‘:by Light’ was developed, a programme of city-wide projects and installations. The project con- siders how urban lighting can be improved and considers how future lighting systems could be formed. Artistic lighting is also considered by the project, the develop- ment of light art in public spaces and how permanent installations can be created with investments and collaborations via the city network.
Over 80,000 visitors have enjoyed the project and we wanted to make some of the installations permanent as a ‘thank you’ to the residents of Malmo who have put up with the disturbance staging a lighting festival can cause. Two of three objects have been left permanently. We also worked with local schools and education facilities to involve students in the project and we also gave them a controlled area to develop freely.
In conjunction with these events a con- ference was held with lectures from Mark Major, Erik Selmer and Leni Schwendinger. Every time :by Light is run we carefully select an area of the city to stage a work in
and then use the lessons learnt from that project to stage similar projects elsewhere in the city. For instance, one year we ran a project in a large park to see how safe interaction with the art could be managed, encouraging as many visitors to see the pro- ject as possible, while ensuring the event was environmentally friendly. The results from this test are now used in every park in the city. To further develop our work with lighting designers we started travelling around Europe to see how other festivals of light were organised. We attended Fete de Lumiere and even showed a piece there. We also visited Luminale in Frankfurt, Lights in Berlin and White Nights in Paris. All fea- tured beautiful creations allowing people to explore their cities at night time in a creative setting.
After a while I started to ask the organisers of these events what the main purpose of them was. One of the consistent answers was that they wanted to create a tourist attraction. Fine, I can understand that, but when I found out how much money was spent on these events, I got really con- cerned. The situation brings to mind Marie Antoinette’s famous line “let them eat cake”, words actually said by Marie-Therese a 100 years earlier. Cities seem only inter- ested in attracting tourists in the short-term with sparkly, momentary wonders. They do not seem as interested in creating long- term public art.
Even if you call the pieces presented at the
principle European festivals of light art, they are still only temporary installations, taken down at the end of a festival, never to be seen by the city’s populace again. This fact prompted me to create the ‘Light- ing Capital of the Universe’, a working title. After years of preparation we now have an understanding between the cities in the region of Copenhagen and Malmo to start a project that will focus on developing all disciplines within the lighting design world. So what do we need to do? If you take a deeper look at the :by Light project you will find many answers. Everywhere around the world different lighting experiences are created, but no one seems to collect the results, this is one of the most crucial things you must do in order to foster a discipline. The diversity of disciplines within lighting design should be broadened and a greater focus should be placed on education. Today knowledge of lighting design is still limited and one of the reasons for this is that there is still very little of it in the traditional education of architects, urban planners and landscaping architects. Educa- tion is the basis of true understanding. I would like to recommend to the entire community of lighting designers that we stop the madness and the waste of money prompted by festivals of light. In the adapt- ed words of Marie-Therese, “stop feeding the people cake”.
www.malmo.se/ljus
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