Winter festival to light up Tallinn

  • 2010-01-20
  • By Ella Karapetyan

FIRE AND ICE: This year's festival, with its bonfires and abundant lighting, will put a warm smile on your face.

TALLINN - The holidays are over and now all there is to look forward to is just a couple more months of winter, with its seemingly endless days of dark and dreary weather. Winter is a tough time in Estonia. Winters in Estonia are characterized by short and cold days. Night falls at 4:30 p.m. and lasts more than 16 hours, with the sun not rising again until 8:30 a.m.
Little daylight, loneliness and less physical activity lead to depression, alcoholism and high suicide rates, especially in urban areas like Tallinn. But if you happen to visit the Estonian capital this January or February you may see that things are changing. What is responsible for that change is the Tallinn Light Festival, with its smart city lights, bonfires, the fire and ice show, art events and happenings in the city’s most unexpected places.

The festival is relatively young but draws on deep, pagan roots in this northernmost of the threeBaltic States. The festival with a 10 year tradition continues to bring light to the darkest time of the year.
This wonderful annual event will be difficult to avoid if you are in Tallinn during the winter time. Estonian artists have been busy creating and scattering their creative light installations all around the town. The idea is to make urban lighting more human and friendly, while at the same time helping city residents to combat the seasonal depression which many Estonians are becoming famous for. This year’s festival concludes with an observation of the Chinese New Year, Estonian-style: the Celebration of the Year of the Red Fire Boar.

The festival offers light installations taking place in different locations, but the culmination of the event will take place on Jan. 30 with a spectacular fire and ice party in Kadriorg Park.
Since the end of the ’90s the Tallinn Light Festival (“Valgusfestival” in Estonian) has been trying to make wintertime happier for all. From a very small event, inspired and supported by the “Valon Voimat Light Festival” in Helsinki, it soon became one of the most popular festivals in Estonia.

Tallinn Light Festival is about what its name suggests: light. In addition to using fire as an ancient and essential source of light and warmth for Nordic people, ice and snow were added as elements typical of this time of the year, allowing artists to be inspired by nature and use materials related to fire. Smart street lighting not only makes winter less bleak, but also helps to put a smile back onto people’s faces. So, the artists involved are in contact with the public space, trying to give new meaning to the dark winter months.

Architect Veronika Valk, the festival’s curator since 2005, brought a significant change to the event by making it focus on different areas of the town, open spaces that had not been too appreciated in the past as cultural areas. This is the case of the seafront, which the festival is trying to open up for the public, and which is also one of the priorities of Tallinn Cultural Capital of Europe 2011.

An important part of the festival is the Fire and Ice Show, which brings to Tallinn’s medieval atmosphere high quality fire and ice sculptures. Part of the show is a spirited winter party with fire sculptures - huge and merry bonfires - made of old Christmas trees.
The moment each child eagerly awaits is when the “Snow Town” emerges in the heart of the city, with the help of professional sculptors, students and various associations. If the weather favors it, the “Snow Town” becomes a merry engagement for several weeks.

From the very beginning Tallinn Light Festival has been cooperating with similar events in other countries, like Helsinki’s “Valon Voimat,” and since 2006 “Lyon’s Light Festival.” In 2008, Tallinn Light Festival devised projects with Portugal (Luzboa Biennal) and Iceland.

The festival runs until January 30.