LICHTGRENZE
light art installation to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall
To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Christopher Bauder and his brother Marc created an extraordinary light installation called LICHTGRENZE (Border of Lights). The Bauder brothers reconstructed the former divider with almost weightless material in an ephemeral way.
From the 7th to the 9th of November 2014 the 15.3-kilometer frontier that once divided the city center was re-imagined in light by 8000 balloon lights. 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, 14 large-format screens at selected public locations were showing Marc Bauder’s film collage MAUERSTÜCKE (Wall Pieces) made from historic, often little-known archive footage about the construction, life and fall of the Berlin Wall.
During three days, over two million people united along LICHTGRENZE to along the symbolic light path and memorialize the heavy border that once divided the city. On the 9th of November, the LICHTGRENZE was also the central part of the official memorial festivities of the city Berlin and the Federal Republic of Germany. In a televised spectacle, 8000 PATEN (patrons) released their balloon with a special personal message in a choreographed manner into the night sky of Berlin.
