Parisians party all night at Nuit Blanche artfest

Art exhibits mushroomed all over the capital for an overnight extravaganza that drew thousands of Parisians into the street for a night of art and revelry.

Clea Caulcutt

Museums, galleries and other attractions threw open their doors to welcome visitors for the ninth edition of la Nuit Blanche, the White Night.

Artists invited to Paris for the event invested a wide range of odd locations including a park, a cathedral, a parking lot and a disused metro station.

This year’s artistic director was Martin Bethenod, who is the director of the Palazzo Grassi in Venice and the former head of Paris’s biggest art fair, the Foire internationale d’art contemporain (Fiac).

In the Saint Martin ghost station, a group of performers from the Paris Decorative Arts School worked on a performance for passengers travelling through the station. When a train hurtles past, they strike a pose in the shape of a letter. The letters for a word that is an anagram of Saint-Martin.

The aim of the evening is to break the routine of museum visits and encourage Parisians to visit art exhibits, says the communication director of one of the venues involved in the event, Laurent Tricard.

“I think there is something typically French about seeking to attract lots of people to very contemporary artistic installations,” says Tricard, who works for the Maison des Metallos in the 11th arrondissement in Paris. “In France, we often organise free events in open-air spaces and experiment with new ways of drawing people to art.”

On the streets of the capital, thousands of Parisians and tourists hunted out exhibitions and venues, stopping off for the occasional drink along the way. For many, la Nuit Blanche is a good opportunity to explore hidden venues in Paris.

“We thought it was a great way to see our local neighbourhood in a different kind of light and stay up all night and go into places we hadn’t been into before,” says Sophie, who lives in the 11th arrondissement in Paris.

According the Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoe, the event drew a 1.5 million people, and queues of visitors lined up at museums in the capital.

For others however, the queues were a deterrent and the Nuit Blanche a good excuse to stay up all night and enjoy the unusually warm weather in the French capital.

“We don’t want to get in line for three hours to get into a museum. La Nuit Blanche is just an excuse to drink and party and be outside,” says Pauline.