Imagine.
Imagine that for one night, your city is transformed into a strange and magical place. Art installations sprout everywhere, in dark alleys and concrete plazas and green parks, on streets, dangling in the air between buildings, projected onto the facades of other buildings, inside tiny galleries and indie shops. Huge crowds of people wander the sidewalks and block the roads, all experiencing and participating in a city turned art playground. For one night.
This is Nuit Blanche.
Unsurprisingly, this festival started in Paris, but it has since spread around the world. I’ve been going to the Toronto version for several years now. Every year I am thrilled and awed, intrigued and inspired. I’m eternally seeking opportunities to feel a sense of wonder, and Nuit Blanche fulfills this need and then some.
The art projects in Toronto’s version of Nuit Blanche cover a huge range of budgets and disciplines, spread out as they are on a spectrum of officialness. First are the commissioned projects, curated and carefully chosen, ten for each of the three zones. These are the ambitious and flashy projects, like I just know that something good is going to happen — an alley in the heart of Toronto, all tricked out with rain, lights, and fog to make a gorgeously noir experience, whether you’re walking through it under an umbrella or watching from the street with your camera.
You’d find very different experience one block over, at Soon. You walk into a plaza surrounded by tall buildings from which searchlights stab down at the crowd, picking out random people to follow. One young man breaks into a run, circling a large fountain over and over again with the light following him mercilessly. A loudspeaker broadcasts propaganda announcements that you can’t quite hear. You’ve walked into a dystopian future in your own city that resonates with memories of recent protests to leave you feeling uncomfortable and awed.
Further down the spectrum are the independent projects that are still official enough to be listed in the program. These are the ones on a smaller, more intimate scale, such as Je t’aime Alouette — a wistful tribute to Alouette, the Canadian satellite launched in 1962, complete with contemplative space-age music that entrances a science fiction writer, reader, and fan like me.
On a different note, there’s The Life Long Burning Question Project, a Postsecret-esque installation where you can answer questions written on postcards or leave one of your own. The questions and answers range from serious to silly, but all are real and surprisingly naked. (More about mail art here.)
As if all that weren’t enough, this festival has spread to guerrilla/grassroots art as well – people creating their own installations to share. You might pass a cage with a Goethe quote (“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”), a rock band playing out of the back of a truck on Queen Street, another band in an alley, or a row of indie storefronts that aren’t presenting art but are staying open late just because they can. Everyone is excited about art and wants to participate in its creation, whether that means interacting with someone else’s installation or contributing their own.
That’s the best thing about Nuit Blanche – the sense it conveys that everyone is an artist, imagination is for everyone, and there’s room for all of these unique visions in the world.
If you don’t identify as an artist, have you ever been inspired to create anyway? If you are a writer or an artist, where do you go when you need to be reminded that there’s still room for creativity in the world?
ETA: Other takes on some of the same installations:
Artist Louise K. writes about the mail art project.
Previous guest blogger Kat Anthony writes about inspiration.