If there is a colour of light with a special ability to make even the heaviest objects seem to levitate, then it is blue. This quality is heightened by the bluest element of all: the water itself.
Suspended in unreality
In this state of limbo, things begin to communicate by silently approaching the unreal as if it were the most natural thing in the world – just like us, the viewers. At some point on our walk along the river, we have all arrived at a different port that receives us a little differently.
Industrial lights, work lights, and traffic lights bathe the port every night. The yellow light-space curves diffusely over ships and cranes, quays and container quarters, erasing all colours except its own. Fascinating in its size, intriguing in its complexity and its extravagant fluidity of global progress.
The colour blue, however, inscribes itself in the light space of the port, contouring and sketching an ironic portrait. As everyone knows, the sea, sky and harbour remain blue in spirit forever, no matter how little blue remains nor how highly industrialised they may become.
The light returns as a luminous difference and separates itself from reality like any idea that has lost its beginning. To create a new beginning, a new visibility, a new identity.
Real unrealities at Blue Port Hamburg
With its reduction to the elements that characterise the space and the establishment of useless relationships, Blue Port Hamburg makes room for light and signs, and shows that we do not need an accumulation of events, but still need myths: real unrealities that touch the collective perception and inspire the individual desire to discover. Because we all have a blue homeland somewhere.
The port, which is also becoming a port for art, shows its most beautiful transferences and transports on the quay lines of a somewhat asymmetrical envelope. Where masses of products and goods are handled, reality also changes. From the improbability to the visibility of a cheerful daydream.
It is finite though, as is almost everything in a place where all things that come have value only when they go. Projects of light art, in which the temporality is already inscribed in their condition, belong to it without exception. They shine and shine most brightly when the light has gone out. As a fleeting mirror of the world and of life, they also reflect their darkest melancholy. And their strongest desire.
