The Gift

This year La noche en blanco will have a slogan to inspire the main artistic propositions: The Gift, understood as a the essential underpinning of any creative act. All works of art emerge as a need to put the creator in relation with others. Here is a lovely text by Rafael Doctorthat explains the complex relationship between creation, the gift and La noche en blanco.

"In a world whose material structure is wobbling, the need for art is coming to the fore as a sustenance to guarantee our own life and emotions.

Beyond the function and use art has had in a society like ours, it remains fixed in the essential intentions that give birth to it. It is time we went back to its origin, to what generates it and gives it meaning in order to see that despite all the noise, there it is: steadfast in its commitment to the human soul.

It is a wonderful time to go back to the original language of things and realize that art is the realm of non-rational communication in which the magical gains meaning and where generosity and enthusiasm are the main features. The gift reveals itself to be the essential cornerstone of whoever creates. What the artist wants to be, beyond a myth or genius, is a magician who makes possible more profound communication between things and people, between time and its inhabitability, between matter and the soul.

So the gift is engendered as the original fruit that gives order to an internal need to transcend the world, to seek meaning and validity in it, to inhabit it joyfully and fully.

We want this Noche en blanco to be a place where the experiences of art are simply yet direct and striking, where the spectacular gives way to the simple and profound, and where the individual feels represented and positively affected. We want to seek a bond through the essential sensorial aspects that lie in artistic creation, to generate a kind of communication that makes people think and feel their own role in the world they are destined to live in.

This Noche en blanco is generated with the intention of giving meaning and depth to spectacle that it is fated to be.

Every single event generated will strive to seek precise communication with each of the spectators, with the overarching intention of making them participants and protagonists of a world that more than ever needs new, utopian options that are capable of sustaining a common dream of human progress.

With very few elements and a rock-bottom cost, we aim to communicate a participatory, hopeful message in a night that in just a few years has become a true experiential festival on the city’s calendar.

Rafael Doctor Roncero