from the Leipzig Festival of Lights 2025
Film retrospective of the 2025 Festival of Lights
With thousands of candles, impressive light installations and moving words, the Leipzig Festival of Lights 2025 was celebrated on the 9ᵗʰ of October. Five light projects by renowned artists lined a path of light that led from St Nicolas Church via Neumarkt and Schillerpark to Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz.
Becoming Visible at the Leipzig Festival of Lights
At the Leipzig Festival of Lights 2025, Lukas Taido’s project Becoming Visible gave an impressive account of people’s courage in 1989. Through a powerful projection onto the façade, the dynamic between surveillance and growing protest was made tangible. Searchlights scanned the building façade – a symbol of the ever-present control exercised by the SED regime. Individual people appeared in the windows, were discovered and disappeared again. Yet with each scene, their courage grew. More and more people stepped visibly forward, until individuals became a determined community and, faced with their sheer number, state power lost control – a powerful image of the regime’s collapse. The staging made becoming visible tangible as a key moment of the Peaceful Revolution and emphasised the power of civic courage and community. The video presents the light project on the 9ᵗʰ of October 2025.
