We've been mentioning the disappearance of street art festivals and the general absence of impactful public art interventions in 2020. And yet with that in mind, we're excited to see our friends from The Crystal Ship wrapping up a year with a special edition of their event—"The Crystal Ship By Night."
Unable to proceed with their annual program, the city council and the festival curator Bjørn Van Poucke, agreed on the idea to illuminate some of the festival’s favorite murals in the center of Ostend, Belgium as well as new artists to create special, light-based works for the event. "This year was very difficult for everybody and we could not organize a proper festival in April," Van Poucke told Juxtapoz about how this project came to be."So they asked me to make four new murals in the summer and to do my take on the idea of doing something with lights later in a year." This resulted in a special setting in which the city put the spotlight on its impressive collection of murals, upgraded some of them with a help of Limen Visual, as well as presented a new series of installations created especially for this project by the likes of SpY, Daems & Vanremoortere, Marina Zumi, Wasted Rita, and Aryz.
Although planned for the original version of the festival initially, the reworked piece by Aryz fitted perfectly inside the city’s music conservatory building, adding to the dramatic sense of the image. His fellow countryman, SpY, designed a 1500 meters long laser curtain above the beach, on which Portuguese Wasted Rita installed a series of her text-based neon works. Belgium artist duo Daems van Remoortere aka Lena Daems and Frederik van Remoortere had set up a projection of their video install Ballooning a House, and Berlin-based Argentinian artist, Marina Zumi, designed a 50m-long installation entitled Gates, a radiating metaphor for leaving 2020 and hopefully arriving at a better place/time. —Sasha Bogojev
Photos by Leentje Brands & Ruben P Bescos (Spy)
