Right in the core of Old Town, LUX MATRIX in the Latin Quarter of Tallinn offers a spiral of connected spaces, to be delicately lit in order to please a new and demanding sensibility. In the framework of a new concept – the Boutique Light Festival – LUX MATRIX stands for an innovative approach of the urban identity. In this first edition, a series of small and medium-scale installations, interventions and actions, by international artists, will allow visitors and the participating community of all ages to look at their heritage in a both magical and surprising way.
Contrasting with the dynamics of mass tourism, LUX MATRIX is a way to acknowledge locality in a most subtle and detailed way, while stimulating close encouters with and between active elements of the city, interested in exhibiting and stimulating a new dimension to the cultural offer. As a lived matrix for cultural innovation, powered by artistic vision, LUX MATRIX aims to remind a broad public that the city is a multilayered reality whose richness is an asset of great value; in Tallinn, this means exploring the relatively unknown Latin character of the Old Town and it’s hidden corners, where cultural encounters of previous ages have helped to shape today’s urban scape.
In order to tackle this kind of structures and images, the model of the Boutique Light Festival is then a proposal of the highest delicacy in its site-specificity, but also with pertinence for other cities and town centers. We must not forget that Tallinn is since the very beginning of the history of Light Festivals in the avant-garde of Light Culture.
Tallinn’s Latin Quarter was in the beginning of the XIII century the stage for an important cultural encounter. The Dominicans settled there – the first convent in the extreme North – and brought their Enlightening, in quite a contrast with the pagan traditions. The library of Mauritius is the living symbol of this arrival. In the Middle Ages the New Knowledge – Medicine, Philosophy… – came to spread its influence in the surrounding areas; today the Latin Quarter, potentially again a vibrant cluster of education, tourism and citizenship, takes this legacy and renovates Tallinn’s urban core with a both fresh and warm spiritually. Art’s capacity is to render new and actual sense to old facts.
Curator Mário Caeiro Co-curator Indrek Leht
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