Durham Lumière Festival 2013

I'm currently working some extra shifts for Christmas and it is difficult to keep posting regularly. I don't know how other bloggers manage to keep up so well. So, I'm a bit late with the post on Durham Lumière, which was at the end of November (14 -17 Nov.), but I made sure, that you would get the best pictures from it! Here you are, I hope you enjoy it.

Durham Lumière is an amazing event, organised by the outdoor event planner Artichoke, it occurs every two years. During the festival time, the city is transformed into a magical place using interesting lighting to illuminate Durham's buildings, streets and public spaces.

Durham Lumière 2011 had some impressive art works (the waterfall bridge, the monument that was transformed into a huge snowball globe, the heavenly installation inside the cathedral, the fire alchemy in the cloister garden), so the expectations were high. 

I have to admit that this year's Durham Lumière wasn't quite as impressive, but it did have some spectacular and magical installations.

My journey started in the marketplace. I was expecting something monumental as this is the city centre; I was left searching for a hidden treasure in this crowded place. I finally found it - a phone box, transformed into an aquarium, off the beaten path. 

Due to a large crowd, I waited patiently for my turn to view it up-close; the phone box had been turned into a lit aquarium with colourful swimming fish.  An exotic little world, a quirky living universe at the heart of Durham. 

Looking at it, made me dream of the crystal blue water on a tropical island. The goldfish reminded me of quirky images I've seen in movies - a girl bringing home a goldfish in a plastic back, which she had won at the funfair, or a lonesome little goldfish, swimming in one of those tiny, empty fish bowls.

The next thing that grabbed my attention, was some colourful street decoration which turned out (upon closer inspection) to be made of lots of plastic bags. It irritated me that something I would normaly associate with pollution, could create such a happy atmosphere. 

I continued to walk down the beautifully decorated Durham shopping mile, which lead me directly to an unconventional Christmas tree...

To see this beautiful Christmas tree was certainly a surprise. As far as I am aware the artist wanted to make us visitors aware of the pollution of our environment, but this was quite a different picture from the growing piles of rubbish away from our everyday view. It illuminated the place with colours of yellow, orange, blue, white and green. Even the children were fascinated by it, and were drawn back to have a closer look.

One of the highlights was the lightshow "Crown of Lights" at Durham cathedral itself. The cathedral is one of my favourite places, but seeing it illuminated in such bright and clear colours, was amazing and breathtaking. 

The light show retold the history of Christianity in the North East with images of the ancient book, the Lindisfarm Gospel. Images of the attacks and destruction of holy island by the Vikings, an all-exciting fire, and the re-building of the cloister were only some of the powerful images displayed on these ancient walls. No words, just music, and pictures.

If you would like to view a more vivid interpretation of how the Vikings attacked the holy island with the Lindisfarne priory, watch the television series "The Vikings" - S1E2, it's quite the eye opener.

Another pleasurable experience was at the sanctuary, several neon bird boxes were hidden in the trees at the old graveyard of St. Oswald church, accompanied by the soundtrack of bird calls. It seemed rather creepy to me, standing in the middle of some old stone tombs, and hearing the voices of ravens, but the sound began to turn into morning bird song and I felt reminded of spring. Strangely enough my body reacted with a tickling nose and several sneezes. It was definitely a magical place, where I would have loved to resided longer.

This installation showed a model of the sun on a more approachable scale. A huge helium balloon was flying in an open space between the university buildings, changing colour to simulate the turbulence of the sun's surface, accompanied by a growling background noise.

I took several pictures of the balloon itself and its changing surface, but it could not truly catch the atmosphere and do it justice. Finally I decided to take a picture of its mirror image in one of the university building windows. Maybe we are used to see the moon, looking outside the window, but certainly not a view of the sun in this size so close.

Like in a scene from Jurassic Park, where the protagonists could feel the Tyrannosaurus Rex approaching them by the rhythmic stamping of its heavy footsteps (depicted through ripples of water in a glass), you could hear the heavy footsteps of this elephant hundreds meter away.

The sight was mesmerizing. The elephant looked real and its movements were natural. It looked like it was trapped within a huge canvas, and made me wants to get closer and console him by feeding him some vegetables. I couldn't help but feel a sudden urge to visit a zoo. 

Just like last time, I was lucky to visit Durham Lumière twice. Once to check out the initial big attractions, and a second time to enjoy my favourite ones again. I hope that Artichoke and Durham Council will continue this successful partnership and I'm looking forward to Durham Lumiere 2015. 

7 Photos, 7 Quotes - How we see the world

A few weeks ago, Emma from the blog Adventures of a London Kiwi shared her post on a photo challenge with blogging friends. It was so inspiring that some other bloggers and I asked Emma do host another challenge with the working title "How we see the world". There were no limitations to the challenge, to give everyone the flexibility and creativity they need, apart from choosing 7 quotes and deliver the photos to them.

My favourite collections of quotes are in the book "The Artists Way". This book always used to inspire me and gives me lots of new ideas. For the photos I used pictures from my trip to Rome (besides the tourist routes). I hope you enjoy them.

Please check out as well the other participants of the challenge. You can find them on Emma's blog Adventures of a London Kiwi.

"Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment" 

Jalal Ud-Din Rumi

"Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist" 

René-Francois-Gislain Magritte

"It ain't mean a thing, if it ain't got that swing" 

Duke Ellington and Irving Mills

"The world of reality has its limitations; the world of imagination is boundless" 

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"There is no must in art, because art is free" 

Wassily Kandinsky

"Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance." 

M.C. Richards

"In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity" 

Albert Einstein

My week in Rome - Ancient buildings

Goethe (1749/1832) - the famous German writer of the world classic books "The Sorrows of Young Werther" and "Faust I" visited Italy between September 1786 and May 1788, and stayed in Rome for one year. His artistic and architectural interest was mainly the Classical antiquity, he rarely interested in the art of the Middle Ages or the modern era of his time. He wrote to his friend Eckermann on the 9. October 1828:

"Ich kann sagen, dass ich nur in Rom empfunden habe, was eigentlich ein Mensch sei. Zu dieser Höhe, zu diesem Glück der Empfindung bin ich später nie wieder gekommen, ich bin, mit meinem Zustand in Rom verglichen, eigentlich nachher nie wieder froh geworden." 

"I can say that I've only felt in Rome, what it actually means to be a human being. This height, this feeling of happiness, I never reached them since. I actually never - compared to my time in Rome - became happy afterwards again." 

It might be a bit exaggerated to apply this quote to myself, but I guess I can empathise with what Goethe meant, when describing his time in Rome, this beautiful place full of ancient history.

So, last week I visited Rome with my family from Germany. We have a family tradition to visit historical cities, but haven't been able to do it the past few years. Rome was heavily anticipated

I had a little head start from watching the BBC/HBO series Rome, the partially historically accurate telling of the story of Caesar and Octavian, the later King Augustus (spoiler alert).
So apart from the Coliseum and Vatican City, I didn't really know what to expect.

On the first day we visited Ostia Antica. It is like the ruins of the ancient city Herculaneum at Pompey, which has survived the centuries. You walk through ruins, which are in an incredible good shape - a bath house, a theatre, a market place, a granary and all situated in a beautiful park of stone pine trees.

Another highlight of Rome for me was definitely the Coliseum and the Forum Romanum.

The Colosseum is the largest amphitheatre in the world, it was build in AD 70 and only took eight years to complete (with the aid of copious slaves) and was used for gladiatorial contests and public spectacles such as animal hunts or dramas based on classical mythology. It was used in the medieval era as quarry for the building of houses in Rome. I was definitely impressed how huge the Coliseum really is, and that thousands of people can walk around it 2000 years after it was built.  

The Forum Romanum was the centre of ancient Rome, a marketplace with temples, government buildings and monuments. All that remains now are ruins, but it is still an impressive place in the middle of modern Rome. 

One of the things that also really inspired me, was the Bocca della Verité (Italian for "Mouth of truth"), found at the entrance hall of the church Santa Maria in Cosmedin. It's a flat stone sculpture showing a face of an old man. It's 2000 years old and might have been an ancient Roman fountain or perhaps a manhole cover.

Since the Middle Ages it's believed to be a lie detector.It was thought that if someone would put his hand into the mouth of the sculpture and tell a lie, the hand would have been bitten of. 

There is so much more to tell. The impression of standing in St. Peter's Square, surrounded by an arcade of collumns, topped with marble stone figures was amazing or the Pantheon, a catholic church, which was a temple for the gods in the ancient times of Rome. The dome has an oculus in the middle, which lets in the sunshine, but also the rain. The rainwater is lead out of the building by a clever drainage system of pipes in the corners of the church, leading into a water basin outside. 

What surprised me is the trend to fake reliefs in the 17th century. Inside the Vatican Museum, you could see that many of the ceilings (like in the picture below) look like marble cornices, but they are in fact painted, including the 3D effect of shade and light. 

The trip to Rome left me with admiration for ancient architecture, but also awareness of the hidden humour in art and culture of the past centuries.

I was always fascinated by the pantheon of Roman and Greek gods, and plan to make a series of dolls based on the 7 Roman muses. 

I have one more post on Rome prepared, which will show more of my photos of the city, featuring the Italian life, and some quirky stuff...

Anyway - I hope you enjoyed this unintended historic lesson. :)