Spectra 2018

Festival

8 Feb

Aberdeen City Centre
February 2018

Running for four nights in February 2018 Spectra, Scotland’s Festival of Light, returned to celebrate the Scottish Year of Young People through the theme ‘Play the Night’. It brought together leading international artists with Scottish collaborators and developed new talent to deliver a four-day light and music spectacular. Featuring major public realm and gallery installations alongside new experimental works from the North East’s creative community Spectra, brought the city to life and celebrated Aberdeen’s creative past, present and future.

Curated Place managed the development of 32 light installations, presented the inaugural music programme, featuring 23 musicians from around Europe, and presented a two day conference featuring international speakers including Eliza Reid, the First Lady of Iceland. We delivered a 3month school’s education programme leading to a major installation created by pupils and the team delivered a city-wide festival of accessible, playful artworks attracting over 90,000 people.

PROGRAMME DEVELOPMENT

In 2018, the festival animated Union Terrace Gardens, the Kirk of St Nicholas, and Marischal College with a number public realm interactives, including three Enlight European Light Expression Network artworks and expanded to include a new music festival as part of the programme. Alongside the fantastic Light Installations we were thrilled to welcome a smorgasbord of Nordic and UK talent - culminating in mind melting AV shows - for 4 days of live music in fantastic city-centre venues, The Assembly, The Tunnels and Unit 51.

Expanding the programme into a ticketed music festival to attract new audiences opened new business opportunities alongside our established format of inviting audiences to engage with playful, accessible and high-quality workshops, performances and works of art that marry light, sound and interactive experiences. Spectra 2018 was an exciting family event bringing light to the depths of winter and bringing Aberdeen to life, creating opportunities for Scottish artists to internationalise their careers and develop the tourism market of Aberdeen with the Festivals Collective and Visit Aberdeenshire.

OUTREACH & EDUCATION

Curated Place were commissioned to run a schools programme with a bespoke educational offer combining high quality arts production with school children. Workshops combined art, design and maths and tied into the Curriculum for Excellence, and resulted in artwork shown at the festival. Our participatory arts team Hannah Ayre and Amanda Yates used geodesic wooden and Perspex structures, hundreds of metres of fluorescent yarn and the landscape of the gardens to create an effervescent visual feast. The work was created by 400 children through 10 different schools throughout Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire in a series of workshops led by Curated Place’s outreach and education team. Click here to see video.

CONFERENCE

Building on the success of our inaugural Catalyst Conference from 2017 we again brought together an array of highly successful cultural leaders, artists and experts from across Europe and within the UK, from both creative centre’s and from the periphery to present their strategy around cultural development. Presenting their successes so far and their aspirations for the future, with a strong focus on Aberdeen. In 2018, we welcomed keynote speaker Martin Green, who successfully led Hull as the City of Culture 2017. He was joined by the First Lady of Iceland, Eliza Reid the co-founder of Iceland Writers Retreat as well as very actively promoting the art and literature scene in Iceland, and Sif Gunnarsdóttir, Director of the Nordic House in the Faroe Islands.

Marketing

We developed and delivered a marketing strategy across all aspects of the festival, reaching a wide range of people, to cover light, music and conference audiences. The music programme featured on BBC Radio 6 Music.