NUIT BLANCHE
MONACO 2016
The First Monaco Nuit Blanche: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
The First Monaco Nuit Blanche will take place on the night of 29th April 2016, with some projects heralding the events in the preceding days, and some events reaching into the following day. It is a public project under the supervision of the Principality’s Department of Cultural Affairs. Contemporary art, performance, film, music, and dance, conceived by more than 20 internationally reputed artists, will take over Monaco, from the beaches to the harbor, celebrating the possibilities of imagination and surprise.
The Nobel-Prize laureate and world famous physicist Richard Feynman coined the phrase ‘the pleasure of finding things out’ to describe the curiosity that drives scientists, as well as artists. He also described this curiosity as going beyond the mere appreciation of the beautiful form, towards the appreciation of the beauty of structures, processes, and ideas themselves.
With Cristina Ricupero (Paris) and Leonardo Bigazzi (Florence) as co-curators, the first Monaco Nuit Blanche is an ambitious attempt to bring this spirit literally to the street, the stage, the water, the sky, creating a string of manifestations involving airplanes, boats, horses, music (including members of Monte-Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra), film (including cinema screenings) but most essentially: great artistic ideas stimulating unique aesthetic experiences. As such, though called like eponymous events in major metropolises like Paris or Toronto, the character of Monaco’s Nuit Blanche is one not of a multi-spectacle fairground, but of a choreography of occurrences. That said, the artistic presentations are pronouncedly accessible to the general public, at no entrance charge. They are conceived and realized by internationally renowned artists including Saâdane Afif (France, awarded the Fondation Prince Pierre Prize in 2006), Doug Aitken (USA), or Laura Lima (Brazil), as well as internationally shown artists Yannick Cosso, Binelde Hyrcan and Fanny Lavergne who are alumni of Pavillon Bosio, Monaco’s artschool.
The aim of this first Monaco Nuit Blanche is to celebrate and create a sense for that which goes beyond the preconceived notion of what can or can’t be done in Monaco, a unique place with a long cultural tradition.