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Frankfurt in lights!

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Taking place concurrently with the international Light + Building trade fair, the ninth Luminale, the popular public event in Frankfurt and Offenbach, will take the presence of experts and artists from Germany and abroad as an opportunity for an interdisciplinary discourse about the city and its future, incorporating social, ecological, technological and artistic aspects.

Reflecting the new concept of Luminale as a “Biennale for lighting art and urban design”, the new format from 18 to 23 March, presents many of the works on urban-design themes.

149 projects are on the programme, in the five festival categories of ART, COMMUNITY, STUDY, SOLUTIONS and BETTER CITY. The category of ART alone brings together 30 outstanding projects of lighting art and artistic work poised excitingly between lighting and the city. Moreover, Luminale will also provide major incentives for a modern and sustainable urban design. All will take place under the aegis of the Chief Executive of the City of Frankfurt, Peter Feldmann, who has no doubt: “The optimised concept has given the festival a new quality. Luminale 2018 will permanently link artistic displays, technological development and meaningful social objectives, raising the profile of our city as a pioneer of modern urban development.”

Five of Frankfurt’s greatest architectural attractions – the Römer, the Alte Oper, the European Central Bank, St. Catherine’s Church and the Eiserner Steg – will be venues for an artistic display of light in the city in multifarious forms. Philipp Geist will be making the Römer into a lighting installation you can walk around, and the Italian artists’ collective Karmachina will be displaying the history of the Alte Oper, playing to Luminale for the first time, in a video mapping show. Urbanscreen, the creative minds from Bremen, with illustrator Andreas Preis, will be turning the facade of the European Central Bank into an animated street-art gallery. In St. Catherine’s Church Viennese artist Victoria Coeln will be creating a polychromatic lighting space with analogue means. Fabian Thiele will be taking the start to construction of the Eiserner Steg a hundred and fifty years ago as an opportunity for a typographical installation with a poem by the Frankfurt dialect poet Friedrich Stoltze.

Among this year’s new features will be a Light Walk, bringing together 35 artistic works from all categories, to form an inner-city gallery and linking both landmarks and monuments with undiscovered and out-of-the-way locations.

The URBAN CLIMATE CANOPY has been developed in collaboration with Master’s degree students of Munich Technical University at the interface of teaching and research and will enthuse public space as an installation, canopy or urban furniture, creating space and modulating climate. 

In his “Light on” project, Jens Schader will be utilising the very widest variety of luminescent elements to cast light on nine “dark places”, seen as unsafe, in the middle of the high-rise development on the Ben-Gurion-Ring, known earlier as a problem district. 

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• Images:

• ALTE OPER FRANKFURT ©Karmachina_Ernst Ludwig Kirchner_Szeneim Café_Städel Museum - 1

• Frankfurt Fades_Römer ©Philipp Geist - 2

• Friedberger Warte ©Christian Uitz - 3

• Katharinen Passion_Katharinenkirche ©Atelier Coeln - 4

• No Future Without History_Institut Fuer Stadtgeschichte ©Monika Slomski - 5

• 5M3_Nizza Park ©Franz Neudeck - 6

• Snowwhite_Taunusanlage @mbox-studio-berlin - 7

• STRANGERS ©Mader Wiermann - 8

• Urban Climate Canopy_Hauptwache_TUMuenchen ©TUM - 9