PARIS.- Bruno Julliard, first Deputy Mayor, and Jean de Loisy, artistic director of Nuit Blanche and President of the Palais de Tokyo, disclosed the outline of the 2016 edition. It will wander across the city along the Seine, via the City Hall and the Île aux Cygnes (Isle of the Swans) to the future Paris.

The 2016 edition of Nuit Blanche will take place during the night of Saturday October 1st from 7:00 p.m. until daybreak. Jean de Loisy, president of the Palais de Tokyo, will handle the artistic direction of the event, proposing a trip on the theme of the overcoming. The visitors will be invited to go through many self-transformation challenges just as Poliphile, the hero of this Nuit Blanche who, in an Italian illustrated novel of 1467, dreams his travel in pursuit of Polia with whom he is madly in love.

A trip in the centre of Paris
From the Île de la Cité to the modern Front de Seine, the visitors will be taken on a time travel that will carry on to the future Paris with the Société du Grand Paris. Unfolding in the centre of the capital and structured around the Seine river and its bridges, Nuit Blanche will be an opportunity to discover the city differently through a trip designed as a symbolic cartography that invites the visitor to live a love quest.

A Nuit Blanche in 12 chapters
A few days before the event, the French artist Abraham Poincheval will watch out for the Nuit Blanche from the top of a 15 metres perch. As for Alain Séchas’ emblematic cats, they will place themselves at the Gare de Lyon in the style of a family waiting for the return of a loved one on the quay.

Nuit Blanche and its 12 chapters will offer the visitors the opportunity to discover the work of the British artist Oliver Beer who will mix live the sound ecosystem of the Seine river under the Pont des Arts. The visitors will begin the trip by crossing a mysterious forest arranged by Stéphane Thidet on the City Hall esplanade. Huge bits of wood floating on a frosted lake will form a perpetually moving living sculpture.

Love will be the core theme of this edition, like the heart drew by Fabrice Hyber for the Nuit Blanche poster. A “broken hearts workshop” will distribute fragmented hearts to the visitors who will be able to have them fixed at the end of the trip in a great “heart fixing workshop”.

The visitors will also encounter Bridget Polk’s unsteady sculptures. All night long and accompanied by performers, the American artist will never stop building and rebuilding fragile totems along the Seine banks, consisting in a vague piling up defying the laws of gravity. Close to the end of the trip, Alain Fleischer will revisit a 1979 project entitled Autant en emporte le vent (Gone with the wind) and will project the image of a woman imperturbably staring at the one who will look at her on a huge fan near the pont Bir-Hakeim.

Free and open to the public, Nuit Blanche 2016 will keep all the elements that made the public and artistic success of this major Parisian event: an open-air gathering of works in the public space, international emerging or experienced artists, and a cooperative approach with other cultural organisations or events. Important institutions will actively take part into the trip as the Musée du Quai Branly, the Pavillon de l’Arsenal or even the Petit Palais.