The illuminated past: using light installations to interpret world heritage sites’

Whether by candle, fire, gas or electricity, light and darkness shape the way we see the space about us, including fragile World Heritage Sites. The ‘lumière’ festival has, in recent years, become an established form of entertainment, with many cities and heritage sites seizing the opportunity to attract large audiences and increase tourism revenues. These light installations use an architectural technique called projection-mapping to create spectacles such as the Fête des Lumières in Lyon and Lumiere in Durham.

Projection-mapping creates illusions; windows spin, walls wobble, buildings move. . Lumiere events augment unsettling effects with fairy tale subjects; local folklore, the reclaiming of castles by the forest, giant figures silhouetted on the walls, everyday objects on a non-human scale, altered by magical realism. These fairytale spaces draw on the creativity, fluidity, and poetics of place inherent in the works of Bachelard (1994); Massey, (1995) forming, anthropomorphising and animating shadows.

Light shows can evoke states of duality and simultaneity in the viewer as the immovable moves, the inaminate animates and materiality dissolves, leading to wonder and spirituality to the sublime, switching on the ‘illuminated gaze’ (Lovell, 2018, adapted from Urry, 2002) and drawing on atavistic memories of fairy tales, recreating the enchantment of the magic lantern. The paper uses case studies of six different events staged by the authors at World Heritage Sites and contact with lighting designers to illustrate, when projection mapping is combined with fairy tale content, installations conjure and deceive us with magical reality.