Jon Irigoyen

Iluminowany tramwaj. Celebrowanie miasta / Luminous Tram. Celebrating the City, 2015

mobile installation

the Nowy Port-Brzeźno route, operating from 5 to 12 PM, the ‘Przychodnia’ stop (see: More Info)

 

A historic tram from Nowy Port has been transformed into an artistic space to enable encounters, experience and participation. The interior of the tram, its décor reminiscent of 1960s cafés, harks back to a time that for the majority of local residents evokes memories of a better past. At the same time, an alternative social space has been created – something that continues to be palpably missing in Nowy Port.

During the short but intense period of the Festival, the Luminous Tram, moving through different locations in Nowy Port, brings back the rituals of chatting in a café, meeting up with friends, encounters with strangers and memories from the neighbourhood as well as faraway places. The tram becomes a mediation zone, in which the stories that reveal the identity of Nowy Port and its inhabitants all fuse together. The transitional and ephemeral is seeking to transform the city and blend the private and the public and make the physical barriers between urban spaces, just like personal barriers and limitations, disappear.

The tram also functions as a mobile artefact, in search of common links with other projects and interventions in the Festival and the environs of Nowy Port. Moving from one location to another, in its own way, the tram maps out the district as well as celebrating it in the form of a social-cum-geographic happening.

The Luminous Tram takes on a different ambiance, depending on the time of day. From 5 PM until 10 PM it is a cafe, and from 10 PM it becomes a dance club

Jon Irigoyen (b. 1978) is an artist, independent curator and cultural agitator.He researches the overlapping relationships between public and urban space, the perception of reality, as well as concepts such as autonomy, resistance and memory. Nowadays he is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Art in Aalto University with the supervision of Finnish philosopher Juha Varto.