Nuit Blanche

"Cristaux," Sylvie Fleury. Nuit Blanche in Notre Dame cathedral.In Paris, the first Saturday of October this year was Nuit Blanche, which translates as White Night. It’s a sort of all-night, city-wide arts festival: there are indoor and outdoor installations throughout three areas of the city (the Marais, the Latin Quarter, and Buttes Chaumont), two of the metro lines stay open all night (a luxury outside New York), and people wander around Paris searching for something strange and beautiful and ephemeral, works of art to see, and sometimes touch, before they disappear the next day.

At four in the morning, we found ourselves outside Notre Dame, amid crowds of young Parisians talking and drinking in the big stone square. A few small fights broke out; there were lines at the all-night creperies. Inside, the cathedral was dark, and glowing neon sculptures, like green and pink and yellow crystals, sprung from the floor of the little chapels that line the apse and transepts. The effect was strange, even eerie, though it became less so with repetition: every chapel had another neon geode, another sharp bright light protruding from the staid stone of Notre Dame.

We had come from Buttes Chaumont, a large park in the 19th arrondissement; constructed by Haussmann under Napoleon III, with steep hills and cliffs, and a waterfall, the landscape never feels exactly Parisian. For Nuit Blanche, though, Buttes Chaumont was open all night, and it became even more unfamiliar, and more magical. The waterfall was lit red, and it spilled down into a stream which, like the nearby lake, danced with blinking colored lights floating beneath the surface. Some of the lawns were blanketed with golden cardboard circles, like sequins. People leaned over the fence to pick up a sequin and then drop it back: individually, they were just shiny cardboard cut-outs, but the cumulative effect of them all laid down across the lawn was incredible. Other lawns in the park were covered with open red umbrellas. The entire Buttes Chaumont became a sort of fantasy land, what children might imagine happens after they go to sleep at night. Paris is beautiful so often and so easily that, living here, it’s sometimes easy to forget or overlook that beauty. By temporarily opening up a crystal-filled cathedral all night or coating a park lawn with golden sequins, Nuit Blanche drew our attention back to the beauty and the strangeness of Paris.

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