Amsterdam Light Festival (9th edition)

Amsterdam can be proud of a historical tradition in the use of light as an artistic material. The first great Dutch “light event”, the Edison Light week, took place in October 1929. For the occasion, a number of buildings in the city were decorated with light bulbs, attracting a considerable number of curious visitors.

The Amsterdam Light Festival has been held since 2012 and has become an important Light Art festival with over 260 works of art, 8 exhibitions and more than 5 million visitors.

Each edition has a theme, and in 2020, the year of the ninth edition, it was: “when nature calls”, linked to a reflection arising from the coronavirus outbreak. In the face of a forced stop imposed by the pandemic, we cannot help but reflect on the life around us. How could all of this happen? How do we treat nature, animals, plants? What can or must we do differently?

To follow up on these questions, the Amsterdam Light Festival and iGuzzini wanted to pay “homage” to three important scientists and acknowledge the role played by women in scientific research. Their portraits by Rachel Kondrup are projected on the facade of the University Hospital of Amsterdam VUmc. Palco inOut Framer spotlights equipped with gobos project the portraits of Mária Telkes (1900-1995), a pioneering researcher into solar energy and its storage; Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958), who discovered the structure of our DNA in 1952, but who, following her premature death, was unfortunately not awarded the Nobel Prize (awarded to her colleagues); Françoise Barré-Sinoussi (1947), who, in the ‘80s, identified the HIV virus as the cause of AIDS, and has since done research into drugs and vaccines.