LICHTGRENZE

Light installation and event for the “25 years fall of the wall” memorial celebrations in Berlin, November 2014

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, an extraordinary light installation – The LICHTGRENZE (The Border of Lights) – has been created, following the former route of the wall separating the western and eastern part of Berlin.

From the 7th to the 9th of November 2014 the 15.3 kilometer frontier that once divided the city center has been re-imagined in light by 8000 illuminated balloons. Running through the heart of Berlin, from Bornholmer Straße to the Oberbaumbrücke, the installation was stretching past the Mauerpark, along the Berlin Wall memorial on Bernauer Straße through to the Brandenburg Gate, over Potsdamer Platz to Checkpoint Charlie and on to the East Side Gallery.

As an integral part of the LICHTGRENZE, large format screens at selected public locations were showing the film collages MAUERSTÜCKE (wall pieces) made from historic, often little-known archive footage about the construction, life and fall of the Berlin Wall.

On the 9th of November the LICHTGRENZE was also the central part of the official memorial festivities of Berlin and Germany. In a televised spectacle 8000 volunteering Berlin citizens, the so called “balloon patrons” released their balloon in a choreographed manner into the Berlin night sky. Each with an attached message related to a personal connection to the Berlin Wall and its fall. The Wall of Light, just like its 1989 solid counterpart, with the help of the citizens literally vanished into thin air.

Hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world were strolling along the LICHTGRENZE for 2 days and nights talking to each other, interacting, learning, understanding, enjoying. More than one million people were taking part in the final balloon release event on the 3rd night also representing the highest amount of visitors in history for Berlin in November. Thousands of TV, radio and newspaper publications were reporting the event world wide accompanied by countless facebook, twitter, instagram and other social media posts. LICHTGRENZE went from 50 to 250.000 hits on Google within 1 month and became the official “word of the year” in Germany in 2014.