The “Spirit of Chopin”
The “Spirit of Chopin”
Sometime last April a very interesting project took part in the city of Valldemossa. A team of light painters led by Vikthor Clarke, did a massive lp image of Chopin, who has been in the city and wrote some of his music there. Vikthor was so kind to provide us with some images and details of the process. My apologies for the ( very late) post due to my absence on vacation…
The story
“Everything that the poet and the painter can dream, nature has created in this place.” This is how the poet George Sand, pseudonym of Armandina Aurora Lucía Dupín, a French novelist, expressed herself when
referring to the Royal Charterhouse of Valldemossa. That was the refuge of his love with Federico Chopin (Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin, Zelazowa Wola 1810- Paris 1849), Polish pianist and composer who at the age of 9 dazzled his country with his first concert and that in Valldemossa, he composed a good part of his Preludes. Chopin arrived in Mallorca in the winter of 1838, accompanied by his lover, the French writer George Sand (A Winter in Mallorca – 1842). They stayed in two modest cells of the Cartuja de Valldemossa. From there they enjoyed, in Chopin’s words, the “most beautiful place in the world”. Today there is no accommodation in the Real Cartuja, which was disentailed in 1835, but you can visit cell number 4, where the musician stayed, and the piano room, with the instrument he ordered to bring from Poland. You can also visit the Charterhouse, the library, the cloister gardens and the halls.
In this performance “Spirit of Chopin”, Vikthor Clarke along with the team that helped him, wanted to represent that Chopin’s spirit and his music is still present in La Cartuja de Valldemossa some 180 years after his stay in this iconic place in the Sierra de Tramuntana. Also, during the course of this intervention; it was broadcast live to a screen of about 300 cm. the image that was forming in the camera while
the lightpainters (light artists) developed and completed the scene, all enlivened by a Chopin music selection.
This project was a collaboration between Vikthor Clarke (designer of the image, the project and creator of specific tools for the event and who has also been part of a selection of Spanish artists that on May 16 and
for the reason of the celebration of the first international day of light, an event in Madrid with the collaboration of Olympus), the team of light artists Light Effects 4.0, Pako Jones, Miguel Ángel, Pepe
García, Mikel Warrior, the excellent Valldemossa City Council , Olympus, Foto Ruano Pro and Musicasa Pro, thus joining the events held during 2018 linked to the first year in which UNESCO chose May 16 as the international day of light, using the technique of Light painting, a non-polluting graffiti and ephemeral in the iconic village of Valldemossa, located in the Sierra de Tramontana that was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO on June 28, 2011.
