I Want To Ride My Bicycle

Not living in a northern country such as Holland, where bicycles are holy and bike lanes are everywhere, citizens of Madrid have to fight against the traffic every day to ride their sustainable transport medium. The collective Luzinterruptus gave back the city to bicycles for one night. With the project Pedaleo Seguro (‘Safe Biking’), they chose three central streets of the Spanish capital to install one hundred red bicycle lights in order to create an ephemeral bike lane. Later they drew bike icons using stencils. Creating the installation took four hours and we don’t know how long it managed to stay there.

Luzinterruptus chose the night as theatre for their work, since we could not have encountered their installation without darkness. Through these lights the artists aim to underline some problems of the city, as if they were pointing a bright sign on something that apparently seems invisible to many citizens and authorities, but they also wanted to make some forgotten city places more attractive and usable. Light, they say, is a non-aggressive way to express yourself, because the ephemeral nature of every artwork let them act without damaging urban furniture and, at the same time, leaving all the space they need to participate to public life to other artists.

Even if only for few hours, Luzinterruptus managed to do something that is difficult in many of our (southern) cities these days: give importance to bikes first.