Amsterdam Light Festival 2017-2018

Description

TWO EXHIBITIONS

Amsterdam Light Festival presents two exhibitions, following two routes in Amsterdam’s city center, each with a different visitor experience and a unique focus on the theme. 

1. WATER COLORS is a boat route that takes visitors past artworks that either float on, hang above, or are positioned along bodies of water.

2. ILLUMINADE is a walking route with artworks that are staged in an urban area, including parks, squares and ponds.

EXISTENTIAL 

Every year the festival has a theme, inviting potential participants to respond and reflect to it in their concepts. This year’s theme EXISTENTIAL was inspired by the present situation people face in the international arena as global shifts create uncertainty and anxiety throughout the world. It is therefore important to look again at what defines and unites mankind in a positive way. The existential elements of light have always provided consolation and comfort to people in distress. 

Mankind has long celebrated light as a life-giving force, as the kick-starter of new days, as the giver of clarity and warmth, as the marker of holiness, and as a source of beauty, and even as a transporter of information in today’s world. It is so essential that its role seems obvious and we almost regard it as an automatic ingredient. We shape our world with fantastic buildings and infrastructures where light is integrated or ‘hidden’, which we somehow take for granted. 

But since the beginning of time, light has existed in its most existential form. With the big bang, light became a central aspect in building the universe and a crucial factor in the creation of life. Light has a solid physical relation to matter but it travels by itself until it is absorbed somewhere, thereby adding its energy to something. Light is ‘just energy’ and the funny thing is that it is invisible until there suddenly is a medium to expose it. 

In this year’s Call for Concepts for Amsterdam Light Festival, we wanted to take a down-to-earth approach and make the EXISTENTIAL qualities of light visible and understandable once again. Since light has the potential to create, to shape, to warm, to vitalize and to connect, it will make people more aware of their positive existential being. Light seems abstract but is in effect highly tangible. By recognizing that (again), we may also see it as an inspiration for life itself.

We need to be re-energized and find new potential, relate better to those things that are organic and basic, and rediscover our place in nature. The EXISTENTIAL theme is intended to provide our visitors with light 

artworks that show a wonderful variety of approaches to essential qualities of light, making people feel that they are in touch with their world, and that they are capable of improving it. 

Theme focus Illuminade 

In the Illuminade walking route we hope to see beautiful interpretations and installations that bring the EXISTENTIAL qualities of light back to the basics and provide a stage for natural miracles and occurrences. Light can be moving, devastating and inspirational in its most natural form. We are looking for high quality artworks that you can touch, walk through, connect with and react to. 

Theme focus Water Colors 

For the Water Colors boat route we are looking for proposals that connect the essential elements of light and people’s EXISTENTIAL needs and dreams, making people more aware of their existential being. Mankind seems to be in need of a more down-to-earth approach, of having both feet on the ground, of finding our place to see more clearly to whom and to what we are related. Are we open for new developments and inspirations or do we build barriers and walls? Can light literally alight us once more for a brighter future? We are looking for monumental proposals on or in the water that connect with the city, its inhabitants, and its visitors.