Nuit Blanche 2015
Nuit Blanche is an all night celebration of art. This year, all the action was on the right bank, rive droite, and showcased installations that started in Hotel de Ville and moved up to north, both nord-ouest and nord-est. The event was on October 3rd.
This year's theme was climate change in anticipation of the World Climate Conference coming to Paris in December. Here is the description from the website (translated, of course).
This 14th edition of Nuit Blanche is a first artistic echoes the World Climate Conference held in Paris in December, and invites you to discover the faces of a Paris that turns over two courses located on the right bank and connected by a tangent.
My pictures aren't perfect, but I wanted to give you a little taste of what we saw that evening.
We started out the night at Hotel de Ville, ground zero for the night, there were many food trucks and information stations here to get people started. One of the largest installations was here: 270 large ice blocks that represented each country. The blocks slowly melted throughout the night to symbolize the disappearing world.
After a quick stop at an art film about Fukushima, we moved north starting at the Gare du Nord train station. We saw a big installation right in front of the train station. I realized that this installation was the blocked off construction zone I had been seeing for the past month. It was an Parisian style apartment building that looked as if it was melting into the ground.
We continued to follow the blue line and came across this giant mural of the Statue of Liberty, each panel had a different colorful theme - animals, calculus, France, questions, music, bubbles and more.
Many of the stops had very long lines that moved so slowly, so weren't able to see much. But the last installation we saw had words shaped by falling water. Every few seconds a new random word in French or English would appear and fall to the ground. It was everything from corporate brand names (like McDonald's and Volkswagen) to everyday words (like document and demandez). The atmosphere for this particular stop was my favorite - some guy was playing music that started a dance party and they provided free ponchos to those who wanted to play under the water. (I found that part to be a little ironic - an art event centered on climate change with trashed plastic ponchos everywhere)
Nuit Blanche 2015: Installation where falling water formed different words in many languages.
We ended off the night with a bottle of wine at Recyclerie, a bar that lives in a once-abandoned train station on the edge of the city. It's got a lively atmosphere and it's quickly becoming our spot to bring friends to.
Our first Nuit Blanche experience was a good one!
xo,
Whitney
Vocab for today:
- la nuit - the night
- blanche - white
- rive droite - right bank
- le parcours - the course
- nord-ouest - north west
- nord-est - north east
- artistique - artistic
