Photographer: Matthew Andrews
People Make Lumiere goes behind-the-scenes at previous Lumiere festivals and celebrates the unsung heroes who make the event happen – from technicians and engineers to the artists and audiences. It offers a glimpse into the technical skill and teamwork required to stage a light festival of this complexity within a busy city centre, and the making of the magic that lasts in the memory for ever.
Light Tunnel was originally commissioned for Waddesdon Manor’s Christmas Carnival, 2018. Reimagined in Durham as part of Lumiere 2019, it had to be craned into place over the Crown Court Gardens wall. Visitors loved stepping into the spiral vortex of undulating light and sound, an immersive walkway that was inspired by the shape of a cresting wave.
Taking over the former Miners’ Hall on North Road, now converted into a nightclub, this clever installation played on the building’s heritage. In this shot, Lumiere technicians are painstakingly attaching hundreds of LED tubes to the façade of the former Miners’ Hall on North Road, as this tongue-in-cheek homage to Durham’s coalmining past begins to take shape.
“I love the idea of a total or immersive documentation of work, covering pieces as they are assembled through to completion and switch on.” – Matthew Andrews
Part animation and part moving sculpture, the LED stickmen appeared to be retaking the old Trades Union building, while dancing to a soundtrack of Working in a Coalmine, performed and recorded by the Durham Youth Band. Audiences were enthralled and applauded after every round. The installation of hundreds of LED tubes was challenging, not least because the nightclub stayed open throughout and because the windows did not correspond to the remodelled interior, meaning that they had to be artificially lit from the outside.
Lumiere visitors in Millennium Place look towards the excitement of more light installations in Walkergate. Behind them Dominik Lejman’s “urban light painting” projection shows the graceful silhouettes of a specially-trained group of skydivers falling to earth in unified choreography as they attempt to recreate the vaulted ceiling of Durham Cathedral. Commissioned by Lux Scientia for Lumiere and funded by the European Commission Culture Fund.
French artist Cédric Le Borgne is pictured here directing installation operations for Les Voyageurs, a series of ethereal sculptures in human form that come alive when illuminated. A Lumiere rigger balances on the roof as he positions the sculpture into place on the front wall of the Church above the South Bailey.
This little boy is captivated by the playful cube of curiosity positioned in Prince Bishop’s Shopping Centre. Control No Control was designed to use five different states of sound and visual form and invited audiences to engage directly with it, using their bodies to make interesting shapes. It is one of several interactive works that feature at each Lumiere festival.
“Over the years the festival has grown and become incredibly popular but it has always stayed true to its ambition to present thoughtful and engaging artworks of real quality and value for free.” – Matthew Andrews
Artist Amelia Kosminsky and her production team, Ben Wallace and Liam Strong, admire their work as her vision comes to life. This suspended installation, created with support from Dyer Engineering and Unusual Rigging, combines the techniques of early photography, lanterns and projection with contemporary technologies of LED lighting and automated rotation.
Having grown up with photosensitive epilepsy, Amelia has always been fascinated and repelled by light and the effect that it has on the brain. Flashing lights can result in a seizure, whereas flickering lights are mesmerising and enchanting. With Celestial Brainstorm, Amelia hopes to capture this second state while actually using neuron patterns to create the effect of a constantly moving starry sky. The title of the piece reclaims the term ‘brainstorm’ which is used to describe a seizure but which has historically been used to mean a period of intense thought or creativity.
Technicians Tony Harvey, Nick Campbell and Denzil Keim take a quiet moment to plan the assembly of I Love Durham by Jacques Rival. The work was a sensation when it was first exhibited at Lumiere in 2011 and the piece was restored and returned for the 10th anniversary festival in 2019. Tony and Nick worked on the original fit-up and 8 years later, many of the same installation challenges remained, including the sloping ground in the Marketplace.
Lumiere engineer Denzil Keim distributes “snow” around the public statue of the 3rd Marquess of Londonderry, better known to generations in Durham as ‘the man on the horse’. Hugely popular on its first outing in 2011, this giant glittering snow globe was resurrected for Lumiere’s 10th anniversary edition in 2019. The Marquess is transformed into a larger-than-life figurine and regularly disappears in a billowing blizzard. The piece had been stored in the intervening years and needed repairs and improvements, including the introduction of a new system for recycling the snow through hoppers in the base beneath the installation.
Artichoke’s Senior Producer Kate Harvey helping a young girl get the most out of this interactive installation of glowing seesaws. With a soundscape by Mitchell Akiyama the lights and the music intensify as the planks swing up and down.
Produced by: L4 Studio and Wireframe Studio.
Witnessed only by the twelve individuals present at the rehearsal for this piece, this image was shot during testing for Spirit on Carabosse’s first visit to Durham in 2011. The original plan to display the lit globe inside the Cathedral itself was amended following the test, and the final location for the globe was in the open air in the Cathedral cloister garden. The haunting and evocative piece included an illuminated trail of glowing lanterns made from miners’ vests hung through the central nave of the Cathedral and a fire garden in The College beyond.
Then Artistic Director of Carabosse, Gerard Court supervised the first installation of Spirit in 2011.
Stopped in their tracks by the spectacle of a giant snowdome in Market Place and oblivious to the rain, faces illuminated by the changing neon of I Love Durham, audience members capture memories on their devices.
“I like to visit and revisit artworks over the course of the festival, there might be something not quite right one night so I’ll go back and there might be an especially good audience scene for example.” – Matthew Andrews
Local people make Lumiere, not least the volunteers who share their good humour, local knowledge and top tips for navigating the festival.
A young visitor dances with her own shadow and brings this giant abstract painting to life on the walls of Walkergate. Originally designed for the Pompidou Centre in 2008, this huge intereactive projection was broughtout of the gallery and into the streets for Lumiere.
“I always loved taking things apart to find out how they work and I think working on Lumiere for so long has, in a sense, allowed me to do exactly that.” – Matthew Andrews
Lumiere technicians working with a telehandler through a damp night in 2019, to manoeuvre into place this extraordinary sculpture made of 6,000 incandescent light bulbs. This was the second showing for CLOUD at Lumiere, which was originally shown in 2015. Artichoke employs around 90 technicians to work on Lumiere in the run-up and during Lumiere, and they work through all kinds of weather for over two weeks to install the show. Here a particular challenge was to balance light levels within Prince Bishop’s Shopping Centre, so that CLOUD could shine in all its beauty through what was a particularly wet and rainy festival.
CLOUD was originally commissioned by Garage Museum of Contemporary Art for Art Experience 2013 (Moscow).
This playful piece invites people to work together pulling on chains to turn off grey skies and turn on a fluffy white cloud made up of thousands of incandescent light bulbs. A firm favourite with audiences, CLOUD was first shown at Lumiere in 2015 in front of the old Passport Office at Milburngate, before the site was redeveloped.
Bathed in blue light, a visitor is engrossed with making this clever musical sculpture sing. Positioned at Walkergate, the piece stood at over three and a half metres and consisted more than a hundred illuminated chime bars. Designed to be visually and sonically impressive, this multi-sensory, multi-player installation created ever-changing patterns of light and sound.
Located in Castle Share, one of the hidden corners of the city, this wonderful meditative work that connected colour, sound, light and the texture of ancient walls, proved very popular with audiences. Originally a winning commission as part of the regular BRILLIANT competition which invites anyone based in or originally from the North East to submit bright ideas for Lumiere, it was made by Chris Plant, a locally-based lighting technician.
Nothing stops Lumiere audiences from enjoying the festival, as witnessed by the throngs on along Saddler Street on a very wet evening in 2019. Spot the unusual traffic light in the far right of this shot. A Different View by BRILLIANT competition winner, Mike Donaghy transformed the city traffic lights for the four days of the festival.
One of several pieces that are designed to involve members of the local community at every Lumiere festival, in 2017 The Umbrella Project was a pop-up choreographed performance piece that led audiences around the city. Around 60 people of all ages, abilities and backgrounds recruited from community groups including Cheesy Waffle Youth Projects and Teesdale Community Resources got involved. Equipped with LED umbrellas as props, the performers danced their way across the city in flash-mob style performance. As well as putting a smile on everyone’s faces, the pop-up performances were also used strategically to move people around the festival footprint to manage audience densities.
This shot shows visitors transfixed by What Matters, the extraordinary immersive installation of glass and light inside St Oswald’s Church that imagined the birth of light. Thousands of shards of hand-blown coloured glass were suspended high above the nave like a shattered star, and lit by projectors. What Matters took several days to install, as around twenty volunteers daily unwrapped each individual piece of glass and hanging it onto a central truss according to the artists’ instructions.
What Matters was a collaboration between the Institute for Computational Cosmology, Durham University, students at the University of Sunderland and the Sunderland Glass Centre.
Technicians from local company Art AV worked on rigging What Matters by Shuster & Moseley, installing and lifting the central truss and positioning projectors around the nave. The light was refracted by the thousands of glass shards that made up the piece, which imagined the birth of light in the universe.
Volunteers at a briefing before the festival begins. Local company Woven Inc make the beanie hats that help keep the festival makers warm over the four nights of Lumiere.
A wonderful backside view of an elephant lost in the city, emerging stomping from a cloud of dust. It wasn’t the first time that elephants had been seen crossing Elvet Bridge, and the circus elephants of bygone days were the inspiration for this change of location from the original planned. English Heritage heroically turned around the permissions process in just five days to enable the installation of the scenic arch through which the elephant paraded. Here Artichoke’s production team are working late into the night to install this extraordinary animated projection by Catherine Garret and Top’lá Design, which brought the sounds of the jungle to this urban environment and proved to be one of the most popular installations ever.
“There’s always something to shoot among the riggers and cherry pickers. Something catches my eye and I’m up shooting into the small hours.” – Matthew Andrews
Members of Artichoke’s technical team using a cherry-picker to lift this elegant sculpture into place, as artist Jon Voss and engineers prepare the plinth on which it is to be installed. The small piece of wasteland on the riverbank is close to where a pair of herons nest each year on Durham’s River Weir, an inspiration for the piece. The sculpture captures this magnificent bird as it unfolds its huge wingsready for takeoff andcelebrates the beauty of nature in the heart of the city.
Heron is now a permanent light work, one of four that illuminate the Durham nightscape supported by Banks Community Fund.
An audience member trying to work out how this magical flaming waterfall sculpture works, one of several pieces in the fire garden installed as part of Spirit in The College at the back of Durham Cathedral. The piece returned to Lumiere in 2019 as part of the 10th anniversary festival.
Installing and testing a fire sculpture, as part of Spirit one week before the event opened to the public. Originally shown as part of Lumiere 2011, the fire installation returned to Durham for the 10th anniversary edition in 2019.
Members of the Artichoke team assembling a chandelier for Bottle Festoon, one of several participation projects that involve the local community in making Lumiere. Almost 300 of these glittering pieces were made from recycled plastic bottles as part of an epic effort involving the public, who joined drop-in sessions in libraries across the county in the weeks leading up to the festival.
A Lumiere technician rigs an installation as part of For The Birds, which included 20 bird-inspired light and sound installations displayed through Durham University’s Botanic Garden.
Veteran Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya in Durham on a site visit for her artwork Fogscape #03238. Nakaya works with fog and this ghostly fog sculpture lit by Simon Corder, rose around the trees and floated up to the Cathedral above the River Wear. It was first commissioned for Lumiere in 2015 and exhibited again in 2019 as part of the 10thanniversary edition.
Spanish artist Pablo Valbuena sought inspiration in every corner of Durham Cathedral in the making of his commission for Lumiere. Methods drew on the 17th century tradition of English change ringing. The complex work connected the historical context of the building with sound patterns made by the bells.
Bellringers were recruited from far and wide to join local bellringer teams who rang the Cathedral bells throughout the festival as part of Valbuena’s installation. The teams performed in four-hour shifts, with the complex ringing patterns transposed into light moving across the building’s façade at the same time illuminating its interior. The screen behind the bellringers shows the computer-generated image of the Cathedral and the bells triggering the light patterns in real time.
Two enthusiastic visitors photograph the giant plant sculptures in The College, part of a luminous botanical garden that brought a sense of the tropics to Durham in November 2015, spilling out of The College and into the South Bailey.
A shot of the Marketplace, magically transformed at the first ever Lumiere light festival in Durham in 2009, which attracted an extraordinary 75,000 visitors. Passage by French theatrical magicians La Salamandre led audiences through the city, across Framwellgate Bridge, up Silver Street and into Marketplace, igniting and flinging sawdust into the air in a beautiful and mysterious fiery performance. This was one of the most daring performances Artichoke has ever produced and no-one in Durham had seen anything like it before.
Audiences in Marketplace were entranced by this iconic red British telephone box transformed into a tropical underwater world full of exotic fish. The artists had to dive into the phonebox first to arrange the scenery and then to introduce 30 carefully selected goldfish into their new surroundings. The installation was wrapped up in insulation overnight to keep the fish warm.
Aquarium was originally created for the Fete des Lumières, Lyon.
With the festival attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors each edition, Anne-Marie and her team work for months before, mapping out the audience management plan and then monitor audience numbers and movement each night during the festival. In this shot, she’s at her desk in Event Control, radios at the ready, with tea and crisps for sustenance in the background.
Artichoke’s Head of Production for Lumiere, Ian Bone, has worked on Lumiere since 2009. In this shot, he surveys work on the river beyond the boneyard, his daytime office and the central production hub where installation equipment is stored and distributed around the city in the days and weeks leading up to the festival.
Event Control is the nerve centre of Lumiere operations, where the combined expertise of the Emergency Services, operational agencies and decision makers comes together to monitor and manage the live experience of the festival.
Members of the Lumiere team gather for a final debrief at the end of the night, long after the audience has gone home.
“I think people would be surprised at quite the amount of work that goes into making Lumiere. The festival is about a year in the making and it depends on a mind-boggling number of technicians, producers, artists and volunteers.” – Matthew Andrews
Dutch artist Daan Roosegaarde walks through the Cathedral Cloister, talking on his phone at . the first-ever Lumiere in Durham. His interactive installation Dune, an eco-friendly hybrid of nature and technology, triggered light and sound in response to the movement of visitors passing along the densely-planted row of illuminated ‘flowers’.
Lumiere visitors watch bellringers up in the bell tower ringing the changes on specially-installed screens in the Cathedral nave, or stand listening as beams of light sweep up and down the building in response to the patterns played out by the bells.