No Complaints about the Elephant´s Ass

Essen Light Festival 2022 leans on projections and led-lights’ limitless colour scheme.

Essen Light Festival is what I’d call a high street festival. Obviously, the route follows the main shopping street, and there is something for everyone. The pro of this style is that the route is easy to follow by just checking the map once and following others. The con is that the route is quite light-polluted and busy and gives no peace to immerse in the artworks. Usually there is no artistic coherency, either. But there might be a late night shopping event to compensate that.

There was no certain theme in Essen, either. The artworks were mainly varying style of projections, easy on the eye, and light-artworks based on or decorated with bright and/or ever changing colours. One thing that was paid attention to, was the use of electricity in the circumstances of today. This is a discussion that’s unavoidable concerning light festivals. I’m biased, of course, but it seems to me that most of the time the cancelling of festivals is a panic reaction for publicity reasons, which helps just a little or nothing at all. As was said in the Essen Light Festival brochure: "You use more electricity if you stay home". Well put. 

The halos were planned for people of various heights. Appreciated!

Angels of Freedom by Merav Eitan and Gaston Zahr is an artwork I’ve been using as an example of simple and practical interactivity in my light art lectures. It was pretty nice to see it live, and in frequent use – everybody seems to want a halo! Also, it’s one of the insta-friendliest artworks I’ve seen. Even I was tempted, I admit, despite the fact that I hate insta-friendliness.

The face in its simple phase

Quite often I wonder why projection mapping artworks art stuffed with everything and its cousin, instead of studying one idea at a time. Or, at least, less than ten. The same goes with Radu Ignat’s Facelessmen. The work includes pretty interesting concept and ideas – I especially enjoyed the play with different faces – but also some technical show-off that diminished its distinctiveness. 

The first elephant in the festival

Stephane Masson, on the other hand, did concentrate on one thing, that being unexpected things in a cage in his I Caught a... I love the idea and the simple everyday magic in its realisation, even though I doubt the necessity of the blinking light strips of the cage. Then again, the artwork was in a busy corner, maybe it needed some bling to compete with the environment.

The second elephant in the festival

Bibi is probably the most adorable light artist I’ve seen (via Zoom, but still), and so are his artworks, usually huge and colorful lego-like animals, made of recycled plastic cans. Like Eléphant Rouge. Especially when seen live. His works are so simple and untroubled that I just can’t but like them. Usually, I wouldn’t be too happy about the view from my hotel room being an elephant’s ass, but in this case, I didn’t complain.

My Room with the View

Children's drawings are a big hit in this season.
Here's the Essen version, Imagine by Daniel and Carina Kurniczak. 

Loud and Quiet in Łódź

The major attraction of Light.Move.Festival 2022 is a series of projection mappings, but some light art works are on display, as well as music and other projects. So there's a lot to see and hear. A bit too much, maybe.

The question of the quality of art is a subjective one, don’t let any art critic claim otherwise. It’s always about personal taste. So, if I didn’t quite get the Light.Move.Festival, it’s not because it was bad, it just wasn’t up to my alley. 

How come? 

Mainly, the festival was too loud to my taste. The music was loud, the colours were loud and the flashing trinkets on sale everywhere and worn by everyone were especially loud. Maybe I’m just too Finnish or middle-aged (Fiddle-aged?), but it was all too much for me. 

I also have a problem with projection mapping pieces and their homogeneity, and the sugar coated mappings in Łódź gave no reason to change my mind. The projections were so similar, that I was surprised they were made by different artists. Pretty much all of them were painting façades with candy colours, adding whirling or wobbling cute animals and/or flowers, and some sparks to finish. With very interchangeable music. And one Porche commercial. Not my alley.

Students to the Rescue

As a silver lining, there was a bunch of wonderful artworks by students from Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź, Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and Institute of Media Art, scattered around the festival. Some of them were in demo stage, but they had sincerity and artistic endeavour, which I do appreciate. The most subtle ones were often overwhelmed by the surrounding loudness of the festival, though, which could have been avoided with more careful placing of the artworks. 

Kamil Druks' artwork beat the surrounding loudness by being deliberately quiet. At first, I thought the flickering of parks's light posts was just a failure in the lighting system, but the design of the flicker told me this was no accident. Which the exhibition label confirmed. It also told me that the flickering was lights morseing “Consciousness”. Not only was the artwork beautifully designed, studying one very simple idea in depth, but it also drew a fine line between art and accident. If I was to decide, this fine piece of conceptual light art would be installed in the park permanently.

A still photo really doesn't tell much about Mr. Druk's artwork. See it in Youtube. 

The delicate Przebudzenie by Zuzanna Białecka was projected on a bed

Misty Reflection by Julia Podborączyńska and Joanna Bury
gave a chance to get lost in light for a while

Divinum Lumen was a student exhibition indoors.
This artwork is by either Włodzimierz Szymański, Klaudia Długołęcka or Andrzej Zwierzchowski,
from the Institute of Media Art. Please let me know, if you know the exact artist,
the exhibition info wouldn't tell.

Looking at You Looking at Me by Piotr Lewandowski and Karo Zacharski
was an ogling comment on constant visibility

Sparkling Joy, After All

Even if I didn’t find the festival that enjoyable, pretty much everyone else seemed to like it. And that’s what the big light festivals mostly are for. There were many happy, wide smiles to be seen, especially on the faces of the youngest audience segment. In particular under the many large mirror balls – and those sparks are something I get as well. You can't go wrong with a mirror ball!

 

Touristy Tip: Buying Train Tickets

The ticket reservation system of Polish Railways is archaic, to put it nicely. You may order tickets online, yes, but they are sent to you as paper tickets by mail and must be ordered centuries beforehand. So, I decided to buy my (mandatory) seat reservations to go with my Interrail ticket from the station in Lodz. According to my one experience: always find a clerk with whom you have a common language. My first two attempts ended up to the clerk waving their hands and talking Polish to me. Loud, since I didn’t understand. Even louder since I didn’t understand the loud version. Google translator had a bug in it, I guess, since judging on the clerk’s reaction, it translated my very polite "May I reserve a seat for this train on this day please" to "F*ck off you f*cking f*ck". Without the please, I believe. The third clerk spoke some English and everything went fine and dandy. With stamps and all.