Hotel de Rome
E.ON was the exclusive presenter of the Festival of Lights and has been a permanent partner for five years now. With its intelligent grids, the company wants to bring more and more green electricity to people and literally connect them with each other. This mission fit in perfectly with the Festival of Lights concept. As the festival’s presenter, E.ON has been presenting its own Special Award for two years. Last year, 21 of Europe’s leading video mapping artists were invited to prove their skills on the Berlin TV Tower. This year, Europe’s largest network operator, a jury of experts and the Festival of Lights team selected street artists from 14 countries. They come from Belgium, Germany, Italy, Great Britain, Croatia, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Sweden, Slovakia, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Turkey and Hungary. The network operator is active in all these countries. The idea was to make visible the cultural diversity that the company is determined to experience on a daily basis. The festival was the perfect stage for this.
Under the motto “Free Your Energy” the artists could give free rein to their creativity. However, a challenge had to be solved. Street art is urban art in public space. In short, the artists usually paint their ideas in the form of graffiti, or murals, as the large-format murals are called, directly on the house walls. Of course, this is not possible on the historical facades around Bebelplatz. That’s why the makers of the Festival of Lights came up with a trick. They sent the street artists canvases, which they could design with their personal art form and implementation of the motto “Free your Energy”. The screens were digitized by the festival team in Berlin and prepared for projection at the Hotel de Rome. At the Festival of Lights, the urban art projects, so-called light graffiti and light murals, were projected onto the historical facade. A win for all sides: the artists could design their works on a historical facade and the fans of the Light Festival had the opportunity to marvel at the luminous works without having to travel to the many European metropolises. The artists’ motifs covered an almost unimaginable range of possibilities: from abstract and minimalist to representational and naturalistic. The Hotel de Rome was very colourful this year.
If you would like to find out more about the artists and their works, please visit our separate page on the E.ON Challenge.
