GLOW

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The last of the trilogy of art/design/light events in Eindhoven in the autumn is GLOW. This is a relatively new festival (this year’s was the third instance) and really capitalises on Eindhoven’s City of Light reputation.

This event recently won Eindhoven Trots 2008, being voted the thing that Eindhoven was most proud of in the past year. (I say thing, as the previous winners were the swim centre, PSV, the Lichtjesroute and Marathon Eindhoven.)

GLOW runs for ten days, and basically turns Eindhoven into an open-air museum during that time. Each year has a different theme and a different route. This year, the route ran from the Effenaar, through the city, past the stadium, and up to Strijp — roughly 2-3kms. The theme was “Connecting the forbidden city”, so connecting the “city” with the soon-to-be creative district in Strijp.

Along the route, there are many weird and wonderful things to be seen: from giant light boxes at the Effenaar to slide shows projected onto entire buildings near the stadium, from a stadium completely covered in moving patterns to a bubble of light containing a small bar.

The event is also very accessible — guidebooks can be obtained all along the route and are bilingual, but white text on black is hard to read in the dark, so a small torch might be handy. The tourist office also runs three tours a night, and I believe there was an English tour on opening night.

Unlike the Lichtjesroute, which I won’t be making an advance note of in my diary for next year but if I’m bored I might ride it again, GLOW would be worth visiting every year. It is certainly popular — we were particularly surprised to see so many people along the route on a schoolnight. The local government reported that there were 125,000 visitors this year, up from 65,000 last year. It’s fascinating to see the city so animated at night.

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