Bristol Light Festival: Flamingos and giant swing to brighten up city
A beating heart, 1,000 flamingos and a giant swing are just some of the installations set to brighten up a city.Bristol Light Festival, which welcomed 275,000 visitors in 2024, returns on Friday and will run until 9 February.It will include ten installations at different locations across the city, such as College Green, Broadmead and the Harbourside.An immersive laser experience which will take over an empty shop at Cabot Circus and celebrate Bristol's "drum and bass legacy" will also be on show.
"We try and find artworks that fit into interesting locations across the city," creative director Katherine Jewkes told BBC Radio Bristol."We started out as a weekend festival and now we run for ten days."We're also across more sites now, originally we were just in the city centre... and now we're also in Redcliffe, Temple and Cabot Circus."
Bristol Light Festival was founded by the Bristol city centre Business Improvement District (BID) and is being run in partnership with the Redcliffe & Temple BID.The artists will include Air Giants, Illumaphonium and Bruce Munro, who all have connections to Bristol.Bruce Munro's Ramandu's Table will showcase nature through an installation of a flock of 1,000 white flamingos."There's locations we know we want to be in because they're so beautiful, like Temple Church," Ms Jewkes added."For that one we've got a piece called Parallels which is this amazing kind of laser sculpture by Architecture Social Club that is going to look phenomenal in that site, because it's that juxtaposition between modern tech lasers and a really historical venue."
Ms Jewkes said the event, which is free, is a celebration of Bristol's music culture."We've got a piece called Anthems Volume One which is in collaboration with Run Collective and an artist called Marcus Lyall, who is known for doing the lighting design for Chemical Brothers, Metallica and The Rolling Stones."That came very much from us wanting to celebrate Bristol's drum and bass scene."
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