Llum BCN

The Llum BCN festival is a European benchmark for light arts festivals. Llum BCN, which is being held for the sixth year in the Poblenou neighbourhood, is a circuit of lighting 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 about something aesthetic, beautiful. This festival is conceived as a great outdoor experimentation laboratory. It shows us the work of artists from all over 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. Those who visit the facilities will be able to discover a new way of inhabiting its streets, as Llum BCN also serves as an essay and reflection on where and how the language of public space can evolve in the future. Llum BCN is full of secrets, surprises and images that you will hardly see again.

About the Llum BCN 2023 edition

The 12th edition of the festival focuses on how the climate crisis has changed our relationship with energy. The proposals for this edition propose new energetically self-sufficient post-carbon urban icons, such as the work Another Moon by the Korean collective Kimchi and Chips, in which a "second moon", drawn by lasers powered only by solar energy, will float over the Central Park of Poblenou ; or Dutchman Thijs Biersteker 's We Harvest Wind, an interactive kinetic sculpture powered by wind forces that summons the air.

Other featured facilities

• Atmospheric Lighthouse: a real-time visualization of everything invisible contained in the city's atmosphere, which will turn Torre Glòries into a great weather vane.
• Call Out: at the DHUB, Abel Korinsky and Orhan “aib” Kavrakoglu have created a large matrix of light that tracks, in real time, the satellites that cross the sky of Barcelona.
• *Anima*: reactive sculpture by lighting designer Nick Verstand.
• Abstract: a minimalist large-scale kinetic intervention on the Pompeu Fabra University campus, by the French Colectif Coin.
• Signes: Playmodes intervenes and rediscovers a rehabilitated space-element: the lantern of L'Auditori de Barcelona.
• Glía: a proposal by the Brazilian Pedro Torres, inspired by the human nervous system based on some drawings by Santiago Ramón y Cajal.
• Liberty and Light: a project by the British artist of Indian origin Chila Kumari Singh Burman, who will cover Can Framis with neon sculptures that have been produced locally thanks to the cooperative work of two social economy entities from Raval: Tot Raval and Impulsem.

The most playful facilities

The most festive dimension of Llum BCN will be displayed throughout the Poblenou neighborhood in playful interventions, such as the huge immersive inflatables by Architects of Air, and the monumental street art by Madrid's SpY, an international star in this scene.

A distinctive value

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

Plan of the facilities

Here you can access the map with the location and names of all the facilities. Access to all spaces is free.

May the light be with you!