AURHOR Bettina Pelz
LICHTROUTEN is Lüdenscheid’s Light Art Festival, initiated in 2002 by the Lüdenscheid City MARketing (LSM), which continues to organize the public art project. Tens of thousands of visitors meet in Lüdenscheid for the LICHTROUTEN.
Due to the location of international institutes and companies in the city and the region, there is a historically grown cluster of expertise at the interface between lighting technology and lighting design. With the Science Museum PHÄNOMENTA, founded in 1996 with a focus on science education, and the LICHTROUTEN, founded in 2002 with a focus on lighting culture, Lüdenscheid’s city marketing has established internationally renowned projects that make the cluster of expertise in the city visible and tangible.
LICHTROUTEN is an exhibition program for contemporary art in public spaces. The artistic directors invite international artists to realize site-specific interventions at selected locations. From 2002 to 2006, the LICHTROUTEN took place annually, and editions followed in 2010, 2013, and 2018; eight festivals have been implemented so far. Despite the irregularity of the festival calendar, LICHTROUTEN has become part of Lüdenscheid’s urban culture.
Festivals of Light
Festivals of Light have been a transnational trend since the 1990s. Among the first festivals in Europe are LUX in Helsinki in 1995, Luci d’Artista in Turin in 1998, Fête des Lumières in Lyon in 1998, the LICHTPARCOURS in Braunschweig in 2000, and the LICHTROUTEN Lüdenscheid since 2002. Since then, the number of festivals has grown steadily. The International Light Festival Organization (ILO) currently counts over fifty festivals of light of international importance in Europe, in addition to countless festivals with local and regional appeal, some with decades of experience, such as SVETLOBNA GVERILA in Ljubljana or ISLAND OF LIGHT on Smögen.
Light in Fine Arts
The Festivals of Light are displays for a plural and heterogeneous selection of works that use physical light as an artistic medium, explore light’s radiance as a visual or plastic material, experiment with the geometry of light, or use light as an image carrier. Light eludes visual existence, and only in its interplay with time, space, and matter do kaleidoscopes of colors and shapes emerge to generate images. Temporality, spatiality, and movement are implicit, as are the changes that depend on the lens systems that absorb the light – whether in an eye, a camera, or a projection system. As the primordial medium of visibility, light is embedded in all visual arts – from the first cave drawings to glass and transparency works, photography and film as light-drawing media, installation, and performance as light-, space- and time-based formats, to the digital, self-luminous display media of the 21st century. In times of digitalization, artistic work with light has become more differentiated. Lamps of all kinds, optical materials, projection systems, and screens are ubiquitous in contemporary art.
The coupling of image and gaze is one of the essential aspects of light-based works, and aesthetic contemplation requires not only comprehending what appears but also understanding it. “I like to use light as a material, but my medium is perception. I want you to perceive yourself and see how you see,” James Turrell formulates his motivation. Many of the artists who work with physical light refer to perception as a co-creative and co-constitutive process of each work of art.
Artistic direction
Since the beginning, Bettina Pelz and Tom Groll have been the artistic directors of LICHTROUTEN. They developed the concept and are responsible for its implementation. The curators’ guiding idea was creating a platform for contemporary art that provides resources and spaces for innovative ways of working and innovative art projects that explore light as an artistic medium.
Tom Groll is an artist. In 1999, he realized the decentralized exhibition project “Illuminare Zonen” in various lookout towers in South Westphalia as part of the “Märkische Stipendium,” a renowned scholarship. Bettina Pelz is a curator. In 2000, she curated the South Westphalia-wide project “Liebe an Unorten” (“Love at Off-Places”) with one hundred artistic positions, thus successfully realizing her first significant art-in-context project. Jointly, they were commissioned to develop and implement a “Festival of Light”. Over the last 20 years, they have curated the LICHTROUTEN together and the GLOW festival (2006–2009) in Eindhoven and the LICHTSTRÖME (2011–2012) in Koblenz. Tom Groll, as an artist, has also been involved in other curatorial projects by Bettina Pelz, such as INTERFERENCE in Tunis, GOLDSTÜCKE in Gelsenkirchen, NARRACJE in Gdansk and the WATER LIGHT FESTIVAL in Bressanone. Light as an artistic material and medium has become the focus of their professional work due to the LICHTROUTEN project.
Decentralized exhibition program
LICHTROUTEN is a site-specific format. Artists and curators work closely together to develop interventions for selected locations or to adapt existing works for selected contexts. The forest landscape of Sauerland and the architectural legacy of industrialization played an important role in the selection of the locations, as did plastics production, metal processing, and lighting design, which are the main anchors of Lüdenscheid’s social and economic history.
The exhibition program consists of site-specific projects, projects adapted for selected locations, and existing projects integrated into suitable contexts. For each edition of the LICHTROUTEN, around twenty positions can be seen throughout the urban space, using light as an image-processing medium in very different ways and employing various light-active materials as image displays.
For the ten-day exhibition project, historical buildings such as the “Erlöserkirche” or the former cinema, factories and villas from the time when Lüdenscheid was one of the most highly industrialized cities in Germany, contemporary architectural buildings such as the House of Culture or the Museum, selected urban spaces such as the public garden “Loher Wäldchen” or large-scale vacancies such as the Forum and the Sauerland-Center, were used for artistic interventions.
Socio-cultural projects
Participatory projects were also part of all editions of the LICHTROUTEN. Twenty projects have been learned since 2002, together with kindergartens, schools, and educational institutions and in collaboration with local art and cultural institutions — from the “The Fireflies Project” in “Loher Wäldchen” (2002) to the large-scale installation made of recycled plastic waste directed by MARek Radke (2018).
University projects
Regularly, LICHTROUTEN has been a place of practice for various universities, including the University of Applied Sciences (FH) Dortmund, the University of Applied Sciences (HS) Osnabrück, the University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HAWK) Hildesheim, and the University of the Arts (HfK) Bremen. This resulted in “Lichtspielplätze” (playgrounds of light), an unusual lighting design for the monument in the sculpture “Der Erwachende” (en: The Awakening) in the city park, and various contributions to 2005’ leitmotif “Parklandschaften” (en: Park Landscapes).
Light in design, art, and media
In the first few years, the dialogue of art and design coined LICHTROUTEN’s conceptual orientation. Innovative lighting designs by lighting design firms such as Belzner Holmes or Stefan Hofmann (Lichtwerke) were part of the route, as were art projects by Nan Hoover, Magdalena Jetelová, Francesco MARiotti, or Klaus Geldmacher. Since 2013, LICHTROUTEN has focused on art projects using light and light-based media as artistic material.
Thematic priorities
For each LICHTROUTEN edition, the curators developed a theme that framed the selection of the sites and the artworks. Over the years, one hundred locations have become exhibition venues during the LICHTROUTEN.
2018 Transformation
The selection of locations reflected the city’s 750-year history, from its extraordinary natural environment to its settlement history and industrial heritage. The large-scale installation “Tape (Lüdenscheid)” by Numen For Use in the „Loher Wäldchen“ was the landmark of the LICHTROUTEN in 2018.
2013 The Art of Projection
LICHTROUTEN stretched from the city center to the station district. The spectrum of participating artists ranged from László Moholy-Nagy to Refik Anadol, from Nicolas Schöffer to Quayola. For the first time at LICHTROUTEN, a responsive mapping project, “Notional Field,” by Annika Cuppetelli and Cristobal Mendoza, was also shown.
2010 Wunderkammers of Light
LICHTROUTEN sites highlighted the industrial culture with the many small factories that characterize the urban landscape of Lüdenscheid. The former “Paulmann and Crone” manufactory became the laboratory of the RaumZeitPiraten. The “Rhizomatic Light-Sound Installation” was their first large-scale intervention at a Light Art Festival.
2006 Architecture of Remembrance
LICHTROUTEN 2006 took place in cemeteries, monuments, and archives. The site-specific projects “As in Heaven, So on Earth” by Mexican lighting designer Gustavo Avilés for the “Mathilden Friedhof” (en: a cemetery) and “Family Idea” by British artist Ron Haselden at the “Wehberg Friedhof” (en: a cemetery) were the audience favorites.
2005 Park Landscapes
In 2005, LICHTROUTEN took place in parking lots and parking garages that were transformed into zoos, dance halls, viewing platforms, and time squares. A highlight was the walk-in fountain by Danish Jeppe Hein at the “Parkpalette Turmstraße”.
2004 Light Biotopes
Gardens, parks, green spaces, and wastelands were staged for the LICHTROUTEN 2004. Klaus Obermaier had chosen the empty station concourses. He flooded the concourse to create a water mirror in which the historic beamed ceiling was reflected in an apparent depth. Tom Groll’s “Talking Lights” installation was set up in the “Rosengarten” (en: public square). They were a tribute to telephone booths introduced in the 19th century and have since been dismantled throughout Germany. LEDs were embedded in the side windows, which changed color under sensor control. They are now in the Phänomenta.
2003 New Perspectives in the City of Light
In 2003, a laser beam connected the spires of the three churches, St. Joseph and Medardus Church, Christ Church, and Redeemer Church, marking the radius of the LICHTROUTEN. Another landmark was the radio tower “Lange Sicht”, for which Stefan Hofmann had developed a sensor-controlled LED installation.
2002 Open spaces
For the first edition of the LICHTROUTEN, the Japanese artist Tatsuro Bashi had a hole drilled in the road surface and threaded a streetlamp to illuminate the tunnel below. In 2002, the LICHTROUTEN stretched from the city’s center tangent “Sauerfeld” to the public garden “Loher Wäldchen.” In addition to prominent buildings such as the town hall, the „Erlöserkirche“, and the municipal library on Graf-Engelbert-Platz, a series of blackened containers served as exhibition venues. In one of these containers, the LED installation “Anleitung zum Stromdiebstahl” (en: Instructions for Stealing Electricity) by Daniel Hausig was on display. It consumed so little electricity that the electricity meter showed no movement.
Audience Accompaniment and Art Mediation
For each edition of the LICHTROUTEN, a group of citizens learns the artworks and the artists’ backgrounds, the technical functions of the works, and the possibilities for perception. During the LICHTROUTEN, they become the guides who share their knowledge at each site and during the tours. Some of the guides have been part of the LICHTROUTEN community for decades. They founded the LICHTROUTEN Collective as a registered association to promote the LICHTROUTEN.
Urban Culture
LICHTROUTEN has succeeded in opening contemporary art to a broad public. For artists, it is a platform for further developing artistic practice with light as a material, medium, or metaphor. For the city of Lüdenscheid and the Sauerland region, LICHTROUTEN has become part of the urban performance.