Choose your own Nuit Blanche adventure
Customized itineraries for any festival reveller
This Saturday’s Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, kicking off at 7 p.m. and running for 12 hours, truly offers something for everyone. Here’s proof.
For an emotional journey 1. Because every dress has a story, Ghost Van showcases donated clothing imbued with special meaning, including items associated with departed loved ones and busted relationships.
The family of Eric Garner, whose choking death inspired the “I Can’t Breathe” movement, has offered one of his shirts.
2. Music (Everything I Know I Learned the Day My Son Was Born) is an Allan Gardens sound installation featuring the cries of the first Toronto babies born in 2015.
3. A mysterious project from censored Cuban artist Tania Bruguera won’t be unveiled until the event.
For the 24-hour party people 1. Social Blanchers should make haste for an occasion hosted by Isabel Lewis at the Art Gallery of Ontario, where the performance artist promises to engage all the senses in a space imagined as an indoor garden.
2. French street artist JR’s Inside Out plants a photo-booth truck by Nathan Phillips Square and invites posers to add their faces to a nearby installation (almost guaranteeing a classier presentation than your usual tipsy selfies).
3. Friends With You’s Light Cave at Drake One Fifty also promises to bring people together, in a radiantly lit prism.
For the whole family 1. Attendees with children — or active inner children — will marvel at Ekow Nimako’s Silent Knight, an intricate tribute to Ontario’s barn owl composed of more than 50,000 Lego blocks.
The piece also offers an educational component, given that the distinc- tive creature has been officially classified as endangered.
2. Crafty kids could get a kick out of Black Cloud, by Carlos Amorales, a dreamy installation of 30,000 cloth-cut black moths swarming the walls of the Power Plant.
3. And the lighthearted noissecorp from Amalia Pica invites attendees to march backwards in a “social sculpture.”
For the waterbugs 1. For those wanting to enjoy the season’s waning warmth with a lakeside view, Dispersal Zone promises to haunt Queens Quay East with modified street lamps pouring smoke in patterns shaped by the weather.
2. Glaciology creates a “living landscape” or human glacier, composed of a web of bodies slowly drifting for 12 hours.
3. Lava Field No. 2 is a five-years-inthe-making mobile volcano, generated by a “geomorphically accurate” lava field created with a coke-fired cupola creating temperatures up to 1800 C.
For night owl lovebirds 1. In the mood for romance? The Lovers of the River Almonda at Bell Trinity Square creates a tableau from coloured tissue and invites the public to pose for photographs as lovers relaxing along a river bank. Further, amorous attendees can submit personal information online that will be used to craft custom love poetry to be projected alongside the photo.
2. At the U of T, I’ve Got Sunshine on a Cloudy Day is a Temptations-inspired light exhibit that ponders the power of love — and light! — to guide us through tough times.