After eleven summer editions After some success, Voyage à Nantes has decided to take on a “new challenge”: attract new visitors and enliven the city in winter by creating an event for the end of the year celebrations. This first edition of the “Winter Journey” will take place from November 24th to January 1st. Unveiled this Thursday, the programming, less abundant than in the summer, will mainly revolve around three artistic interventions.
The first will be visual and luminous with the creation of moldings and sculptures, specially made by the artist Vincenzo Olinet, suspended from the facades of buildings or displayed on the street. Their illumination of “unlikely colors” every evening starting at 5 pm will invite the walker to “stroll” on a path of about 1.5 km in the city center.
A riot of bells every evening
The second intervention will be sound with about twenty bells, real or in the form of loudspeakers, which will ring from eleven churches, several bridges and some monuments. It will not be “a melody”, explains the artist Domenico Blaisrather than a “tingling wave” that will grow in the city to a “moment of turmoil”. These bells will be heard every day from 5 pm for a total sequence of about twenty minutes.
Finally, the third intervention will be mobile as it aims to “revisit” the usual carousel of the Place du Bouffay, resembling both a little train and a caterpillar. The carousel and its floats will be kept but new decorations and a new atmosphere evoking “the imagination of the snowman” and “the conquest of the moon” will be created by the Nantes resident. Quentin Faucomprè.
Christmas markets unchanged this year
Le Voyage en hiver will also offer a walk with a crazy brass band or a night tasting at the Talensac market (December 3). The Christmas market in Place Royale and Place du Commerce, as well as L’Autre marché in Feydeau, are kept in their usual formats, but “a reflection opens up” for an intervention by Voyage à Nantes “probably next year”. Specific Christmas activities for merchants will also be strengthened this year, while the castle of the Dukes of Brittany will organize a night of December 10th and that the Machines de l’île will light up, as every year, with the Noël aux naves event.
The budget for this winter trip is estimated at around 800,000 euros, according to Nantes Métropole. This amount includes an expenditure of around 600,000 euros for shows and illuminations, or “the equivalent” of what the city of Nantes spent during the previous year-end celebrations, assures the community. The rest corresponds to the annual investment for the realization of works by Vincent Olinet, Dominique Blais and Quentin Faucompré.
All three are set to return in subsequent winters for a period of at least five years. However, the program will be enriched with “new proposals” over the years. “There is a desire to make Nantes an end-of-year destination”, speculates Gildas Saläun, Deputy Mayor of Nantes.
