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FESTIVALS OF LIGHT / HELEN MARRIAGE MAKING THE HARD SELL
Helen Marriage, as director of the Artichoke Trust, is responsible for ‘Lumiere’, the UK’s largest light festival. After the festival’s latest incarnation, Marriage made the case for the powerful effect light festivals can have communities.
Helen Marriage founded Artichoke Trust with Nicky Webb in 2005, with the aim of taking art to the people. In the years since, Arti- choke has become a renowned artistic facil- itator, working with artists from around the world to create large-scale public events that appeal to a wide audience. From ‘The Sultan’s Elephant’, by French theatrical ge- niuses, Royal de Luxe, a life-sized mechani- cal creature, which strode down the Mall in London, looking like something straight out of ‘A Passage to India’, thumping its way underneath Admiralty Arch shooting sprays of water into enthralled crowds, to the Telectroscope a ‘quirky pseudo-Victorian creation’ that linked New York and London via an illusionary transatlantic tunnel. The Artichoke organised ‘Lumiare’ has been a reoccurring fixture in the company’s calendar. The spectacular light festival, the UK’s largest, has been staged in Durham three times and last year the festival made the jump to Derry/Londonderry for the first time, as part of the city’s ‘Year of Culture’ celebrations.
“It requires a planning process of two years,” says Marriage on the time it takes to curate and organise Lumiare, “it is a very complicated and painstaking process. You have to discover not only how a city works, but also get artists to come and commit to the festival. Then you have to assist in the evolution of their ideas, artists come on visits and look at particular buildings and spaces and think about how they might articulate what they are thinking in the context of the city.”
As well as curating the programme, Marriage is responsible for organising the nitty-gritty of the festival. “It’s a bit like playing three dimensional noughts and crosses,” she says. “You have to gain the permission of the owners of the buildings in- volved, you have to think about how the art will work technically and how an audience will move through a space.” This process is complicated by issues such as traffic and pedestrian management, especially difficult in a city like Derry, which suffers from con- gestion problems. Add this to the fact that you have to make a separate application to the council for each street-light you want turned off, a critical element of a city-
based lighting event, and you have quite the organizational feat on your hands. Yet despite the organisational and bureau- cratic task the festival poses, the purpose of the event rarely slips from view. “The aim of Lumiare,” says Marriage, “is to transform public space and to play into the history and the social setting that exists within a city. Derry, for example, contains many people with differing attitudes and loyalties, who have different things to say about the place where they live, our pro- gramme tries to articulate that.” The public response to Lumiere in Derry was overwhelmingly positive and on the first night 70,000 people passed through the city during its four hour running time. The effect a festival of this nature can have on a community was particularly evident in Derry.
“The conflict is still very recent,” says Marriage, “and feelings are still very raw, nothing is really resolved here. So what we essentially did was issue an invitation for people to come out after dark and explore territory that isn’t necessary their own.” In Derry this made for quite an incredible sight. “It’s just people in the dark, taking it all in, with their coats on, nobody can tell who is from where and that is part of the point of doing it,” adds Marriage.
Artichoke often receives requests for Lumiere to be staged in different places. “Whenever we go to a new city and the authorities say, ‘we really want you to do what Artichoke does best’, and we go ‘really?’, because the journey for them will be really quite tricky. We are saying to a city, basically, that we want to disrupt the place and the entire apparatus of a city is designed to keep things moving along in an ordered way. So going in and announcing ‘we want to change everything,’ can be quite a hard sell and
anything we say doesn’t quite explain what it really feels like to be in the middle of it all when it’s happening.”
As the debate as to whether light art really can represent an art-form in itself, or instead can only be deemed a crowd-pleas- ing entertainment continues, Marriage is plain as to where she stands, “I think it is definitely art, it may be entertaining at the same time, but each piece is a curated work, we only work with artists, we don’t work with laser companies or technology companies, we present the work of artists.”
www.artichoke.uk.com
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