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Nuit blanche/White night 2008
Don't go to bed - stay up and see some art!
by Aidan O'Donnell
Article published on the 2008-10-03 Latest update 2008-11-07 13:55 TU
Paris’ Nuit Blanche — variously translated as “sleepless night” or “all-nighter” opens museums for much of the night and presents art installations and events in curious locations around the city until dawn. Its France's most successful cultural export since Vanessa Paradis sang about taxis.
It rained in 2002, the first year that they suggested Parisians would have nothing better to do on a Saturday night than drop into the museums they rarely managed to visit by day.
It didn’t rain all night but it was fairly pouring it down at 4 am as I tramped along the banks of the Seine looking for an art installation that was to involve “an illuminated phantom train” running across a bridge. It never materialised - thanks to it being a phantom, I suppose.
That first year, people propelled themselves with no little enthusiasm across swathes of the city to discover that the exhibition or art installation they had come to see was the same one several hundred others had decided to check out at the same time.
The Nuit Blanche that year was like visiting the Louvre, but on a vaster scale. We had the corresponding exhaustion and crowds but the lack of a roof made conditions harsher.
However, when a few hardy souls appeared at City Hall at 6 am, the city supplied free breakfast, as surprised as we were that anyone had taken them seriously when they suggested that everyone “stay up all night and visit art”.
But that, as they say, was then.
Nuit blanche 2007
(Photo: Mairie de Paris)
The idea has since been exported so successfully that if you’re not in Paris on 4 October you might actually have your own Nuit Blanche near you. Toronto, Brussels and the Maltese capital Valletta are each running their own version on the same night.
And all-nighters have already happened this year in Riga, Bucharest, Madrid, Chicago and Montreal. You’re still in time to catch Miami in early November.
The Paris organisers say they have “deliberately concentrated” the layout for this year’s Nuit Blanche. The 70 art installations and events are centred around five Parisian train stations with a few churches and towers thrown in for good measure.
Nuit blanche 2007
(Photo: Mairie de Paris)
The stations that will become hubs of contemporary art on Saturday night are Gare du Nord/Gare de L’Est, Gare de Lyon/Gare de Bercy, Gare Montparnasse and Gare St Lazare. There is a touch of irony in using the train stations as focus points since one of the few things you won’t be able to do all night is take a métro.
French train-drivers' unions are a force equalled only by the magic potion from Astérix, and so the metro will not run after 2 am. (As if to confirm this, the exception is the driverless line 14 which will run all night).
It may all be part of a plot to ensure Parisians don’t wimp out by sneaking home at 4 am and do actually keep moving from installation to installation until dawn. Otherwise one of the 247 night-buses should allow you to get home at a time that will allow you to experience part of the next day.
This does however leave a Paris métro driver time to wander down to, say, the Église Saint-Germain des Près and hear Patti Smith (and family) singing texts by Saint Francis of Assisi. Or to pop by the Tour Montparnasse for a light & sound installation by the Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda; or to the Gare du Nord for an “industrial opera” run though the PA system.
The Indian filmmaker Shaad Ali will be turning Gare de Lyon into an all-singing, all-dancing Bollywood film set until the early hours while in the carpark of the Gare de Bercy you’ll find experimental film, compliments of Armenia’s Artavazd Pelechian. A collection of events for kids is running until 11 pm in the nearby Parc de Bercy.
If you think the acrobatics of Kung Fu movies deserve to be rated with the best of physical art, you might want to see the production by Hong Kong’s Johnnie To in front of the Comédie Française.
And music fans might want to try the classic venue of … Sothebys? From six until midnight the prestigious auction house will be exhibiting a collection of Jacques Brel’s material (records, guitars, manuscripts) that will disappear into private hands when it all goes under the hammer four days later.
It goes on and on. Blind people and elephants in a Brooklyn swimming pool (Église St Eustache), biblical exegesis with music and food until 2 am (Église Réformée des Batignolles) or a web project where 4,000 people read a page each of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (Hotel d’Albret). For the blow-by-blow run down of what exactly is happening where, browse through the 80-page programme in English.
But, never mind the art, the most important piece of information is that breakfast is to be found in the town hall of the 12th arrondissement from 4 am onwards.
Further information
The entire programme in English as a pdf
Paris Nuit Blanche website — in French
Paris Nuit Blanche website — in English
Paris City Hall Paris Nuit Blanche website —in English
