When artworks embrace the heart of the city

Last weekend, the first major event took place in Nova Gorica, where I live, as a kind of prelude to 2025, when the border towns of Nova Gorica (Slovenia) and Gorizia (Italy) will jointly host GO!2025, European Capital of Culture. The city came alive with impressive and colourful open-air arts installations, an impressive exhibition for all visitors and artlovers.

Nova Gorica hosted the R.o.R. Festival, an international festival of contemporary multimedia artistic practices, in its centre. In addition to workshops, lectures, concerts and telescope skywatching, the most interesting part of the festival was the so-called Light trail, which was created by 9 Slovenian and international artists who expressed their creativity in light installations around the city. Artists that created this exhibition all work at the intersection of science, art and technology.

The most prominent was the giant full moon by artist Luka Jerram. The mock-up of the moon, seven metres across, was made using NASA's extremely high-resolution images of the lunar surface. The scale of the model is 1:500,000, which in practice means that 1 cm on the model represents 5 km of the lunar surface. The artist is also the recipient of honorary doctorates from the University of Bristol (2020) and the University of Gloucestershire (2022). Finally, thanks to him, I managed to take a nice photo of the moon myself 😜

A very popular point was made by artist Claudia Reh Echtzeitlich, who projected images created with the help of the participants onto the city monument, nearby buildings and surrounding trees. She captured beautiful, almost psychedelic scenes.

She used an interesting "technique", painting colourful images on transparent foils, which she then projected onto the surrounding area with the help of graphoscopes. She created a huge colourful mural that left no one indifferent.

Have you ever wished you could catch your own shadow? This time you could, thanks to two artists, Manuel Brajnik and Jan Lavric, with an installation called Catch your shadow. You could step onto a platform that was illuminated with reflectors that cast your shadow on the wall. The spotlights then went out, leaving your shadow trapped on the wall. Magic? No, it's just science 😀

When I saw the latter hanging installation, words like comet, armageddon, dinosaur extinction came to mind 🙄. Artists Leon Vidmar and Marko Ceh installed a light installation in the park among the canopy, which conjured up different atmospheres for the visitors by switching the lights on and off. From rapture to awe.

The artist Luka Savic has created an interesting installation with an even more interesting and grand title, As in Heaven, So on Earth. I think any further writing is superfluous :)

For the first time I had the opportunity to see how technology can help us create something extraordinary. Artist Hanno Kautz has created a gadget that turns human touch into sound. Yes, you heard right. By touching each other's hands, the artist created beautiful melodies which he played for the visitors. He turned the human body into a real musical instrument.

The next colourful installation that attracted the visitors was by Matej Bizovicar, who conjured up colourful creatures in the sky. In the evening, bathed in the glow of the lights, the colours were more pronounced than in the daytime. A real bar spectacle. Later I read online that this work of art symbolises refugees, using the colourful shoal of fish as a metaphor for them, moving freely on the world's seas,...

My favourite spot was this colourful tunnel with light effects and music. This is the work of a group of young people who came together under the name Beam Team. I even remembered the name of this light installation, Portal. I was really taken by it, and watching these light effects accompanied by the catchy music made me feel as if time had slowed down!

I can’t remember when was the last time that I sow so many people in the city in the evening. The attendance was overwhelming, the whole city came alive and people were enthusiastic about the festival. I must admit, that in our family we were so captured by the art works, that we went to admire them two times😊. I got the feeling that people were hungry for cultural events, of which there are not many in Nova Gorica. If I can judge the whole upcoming Go!2025 by this first event, then I can only say, I can't wait for 2025!

The official video of the festival is available here. Enjoy watching it!

Thanks for reading,
feel free to leave a comment, I will be glad to reply to.
Best regards, @miljo76

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