Llum BCN

The Llum BCN festival is a European benchmark for light art festivals. Llum BCN, held for the seventh year in the Poblenou neighborhood, is a circuit of light installations in which art and technology come together. For three nights Llum BCN will transform the urban landscape of Poblenou. Large state-of-the-art buildings, creative and artistic spaces, gardens, streets, squares and even a parking lot will change thanks to the expressive capacity of light. And it is not just something aesthetic, beautiful. This festival is conceived as a great laboratory of outdoor experimentation. It showcases the work of artists from around the world who come from different disciplines: art, lighting design and interactive environments, architecture, expanded audiovisual and live arts. These artists explore the possibilities offered by new techniques such as dynamic lighting, interactive environments, large-scale projection, virtual reality and artificial intelligence. Visitors to the installations will discover a new way of inhabiting their streets, as Llum BCN also serves as a rehearsal and reflection on where and how the language of public space may evolve in the future. Llum BCN is full of secrets, surprises and images that you will hardly ever see again.

About the Llum BCN 2024 edition

The 13th edition of the Llum BCN festival's main focus is to explore the interaction between artistic work and public space, as well as to highlight the presence and contributions of women artists in this field. This year, 13 professional installations and 15 school installations will be on view.

Featured installations

Patterns and Recognitions. A three-part composition by United Visual Artists

The central proposal of Llum BCN 24 is the triptych Patterns and Recognitions by London-based studio United Visual Artists (UVA), led by Matt Clark.

This triptych consists of three projects:

• Silent Symphony: inspired by the music of the spheres and cosmic synchronicities.
• Vanishing Point: uses Renaissance perspective to reshape space with beams of light.
• Present Shock: confronts the viewer with statistical clocks representing real-time information, exploring how the speed and volume of data challenges our perception in the information age.

Special schedule:

• Friday 2, 7:00 p.m. to 11:30 p.m.
• Saturday 3, from 10:00 to 17:00 h and from 18:30 to 23:30 h.
• Sunday 4, from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm and from 6:30 pm to 11:00 pm.

The three installations will be open to the public from February 5 to March 17. Admission to the exhibition will be charged in this case (check prices on the website of the DHub website).

Structures of being

The Casa Batlló continues its commitment to carry Gaudí's legacy into the future by inviting digital artist Sofía Crespo to map its façade. Crespo, a pioneer in merging biology and artificial intelligence, presents her project "Structures of Being", which explores nature as an evolutionary process of infinite creativity, inspired by Gaudí. Through her personal microscope, the artist immerses us in the evolution of life, revealing the beauty of existence present in Casa Batlló. The mapping includes music by Robert M. Thomas and the participation of local performers such as Juan de la Rubia and the string quartet Cosmos.

The free projections will take place on January 27 from 9 p.m. and January 28 from 7 p.m., with sessions every half hour until 10:30 p.m., and can be followed live on the organization's website.

Look at the Sun

This installation poses the question of how we would experience time in a different environment, suggesting the idea of moving to Mars and situating the Glòries Tower in that Martian scenario. In this imaginative proposal, Elisa Storelli develops the installation "Look at the SUN", where the Glòries Tower is illuminated by a virtual sun during a day on Mars, becoming a giant sundial that reflects the passage of time on the red planet. This project, commissioned by Mirador Torre Glòries, aligns with its exhibition narrative by amplifying the connections between urban and planetary ecosystems, encouraging visitors to contemplate their surroundings with awareness and responsibility.

A distinctive value

What sets Llum BCN apart from other light festivals is the commitment to experimentation and innovation of students from art, design, lighting and architecture schools in Barcelona, who participate with various light installations. In this edition there will be seventeen participating schools.

Map of the installations

Here you can access the map with the location and names of all the installations. Access to all the spaces is free, except for the main installation Patterns and Recognitions.

May the light be with you!