Selecting Narratives: Creating Galleries of Experience

For three nights in December, from 8pm to midnight, the streets of the centre city Lyon swell with up to 2 million visitors. Historically the Lyonnaise celebrate the virgin Mary on the 8^th of December, lining their window sills with candles. More recently art installations, cinema-graphics and light sculptures descend on the city during this special date.

La Fêtes des Lumières is not just a religious festival, but a cultural one; Lyon becomes a living homage to the Lyonnaise natives and inventors of the modern cinema, the Lumière brothers. As a 2000-year-old city, its long and complicated history was frequently reflected upon in the story-lines, both of individual artworks, and in the route you took through the city. Living in center city I could easily venture through the anti-terrorism barricades each night to attempt a new route through the performances and artworks. Perhaps it is unsurprising that the works that left the strongest impression, were ones that found new ways to impart the significance of this cultural narrative onto an expat like myself.

At 8pm on the dot, the projection of a train rumbled like an earthquake onto the side of La Musée des Beaux Arts, opening with a dedication to the Lumiere Brother’s first film, “L’arrivee d’un train en gare de La Ciotat”. La Ciotat was the first place in France I’d visited outside of Lyon; my foray into the gallery of cultural history of Lyon had unintentionally been mapped onto my lived experience in France.

The performance that captured my imagination, attention and memory thoroughly was “Evolution” (2016). A collaborative work between French artist and musician EZ3kial, projected onto the façade of Cathédrale St Jean. Lasers, lights and music, map and interact with the materials of the building.  The different faces of the church through the decades are brought to light and to life; “see the cathedral rising in its original materials, and then reborn of paper, silk, steel, light and energy” (damecouleur 2016). It has been described as a “poetic epic” (damecouleur 2016), an artwork, a performance, a re-imaging, an attempt to fragment the reality of the building, realizing a hidden lease of life.  Like the works of Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries, “Evolution” holds its audience in a temporal – spatial contract. The work cannot be experienced outside the festival, in its authenticity, because its narrative hinges off the real, physical building, a real space, and the purpose of the festival itself. Simultaneously, this artwork contributes to the over-arching reverential purpose of the festival, which embodies the values of the city itself; the exploration and innovation of artistic techniques to celebrate tradition and history. While this work itself, does not obviously lend itself to the digital literature genre, in its entirety the festival is an interactive fiction bound to a fixed point in time. Visitors are temporarily submerged in this larger than life fiction of gallery that ascends on and transcends the physical confines of experiencing the city. The way the works in this festival are mapped over an entire city create a sort of treasure hunt, if you wish, you can stick with the main flow of traffic and unveil the artworks in the historical chronology in which they are presented. However, you also have free reign, you can create your own gallery of experience.

Reference

EZ3kial, “Evolution”  2006 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xduRML9EUo

damecouleur, Cathedrale St Jean – Fete des Lumieres 2016