Paper short abstract:

Festival of light reinvent the public space by implementing ephemeral artworks as part of a cultural program. But, what are the curatorial and artistic practices behind these events that make people enjoy those new places out of everyday life? An ethnographic case study in two Portuguese cities

Paper long abstract:

Municipalities are betting on light festivals as ways to celebrate urban space, as well as to satisfy the cultural and artistic appetite of residents. These festivals are characterized by implementing artistic works in the public space that are not aggressive, nor corrosive, to material heritage. Quite often their program is predominantly composed of videomappings and autonomous and independent light structures, which underline their soft impact on buildings and other pre-existing structures. Here we will review the discourses of creating ephemeral emotional spaces used by curators, as well as the main practices that artists adopt to appropriate public space, surfaces and objects in an effort to temporarily re-signify the ordinary and create places that invite the visitor to enjoy of the "new" place, thru temporal hyper-sensorial ambiences. This ethnographic study is based on the ethnographic work carried out in Cascais and Loulé (Portugal) between 2016 and 2019 by the author.