Derry-Londonderry Lumiere 2013 – review

Before there is light, there must be darkness – and this was the big problem at the Derry-Londonderry Lumiere, a four-night festival brought to the 2013 City of Culture by Artichoke, the amazing arts production company that has already put together similar events in Durham (the first in 2009, the third only last month). For whatever reason, the city leaders, not to mention its business people, had not quite got the message. Last Thursday evening, Derry was ablaze: shops open, street lights on, Christmas decorations up. Combine these distractions with the fact that traffic continued to roll past several of Lumiere's prime locations – road closures in Northern Ireland are not, I was told, a straightforward business – and I was mourning the lack of magic before I'd even set off from my hotel; the 17 installations that comprised Lumiere were going to be quite lost in all this dazzle. No wonder some locals seemed more intent on racing to Debenhams than in discovering Compagnie Carabosse's Fire Garden, over the river in St Columb's Park.

Ah, yes: Fire Garden. This installation, crackling and numinous, was familiar to me from a visit to Durham two years ago, which was perhaps why it now felt just a little cut-price. In Durham, its red-hot spirals and plumes were gathered in and around the cathedral, and the whole thing felt thrillingly medieval. In St Columb's Park, though, there was no grand backdrop; the fires either marked out paths, or extended over the grass in the manner of a blazing, spitting orchard. It was pretty enough, but it lacked drama, especially given that this is a city known for its bonfires. Meanwhile, the lanterns made from miner's vests that had looked so wonderful hanging in the nave of Durham Cathedral – glowing torsos that memorialised the north-east's industrial past – here floated in the trees, to less intense effect. What a lazy bit of recycling! Derry was known for its linen industry, not its mines. (To be fair, this heritage was celebrated elsewhere by Tim Etchells, who'd written the words "A Stitch in Time" in LED lights, and placed them on top of the old Rosemount shirt factory.)

Also familiar, en route to St Columb's, were Cédric Le Borgne's The Travellers (Les Voyageurs), a series of spectral figures made from what looks like chicken wire (so much more beautiful than this sounds). I still enjoyed them, but to truly spook, they need to be seen in inky dark; in Derry, they were arranged along, and had to compete with, the Peace Bridge that crosses the Foyle, a sculpture in its own right, and one that is already illuminated.

Mostly, though, I was looking at new works, or new to me. Setting out, I had only to lift my eyes to see the first of these. On the top of the BT exchange building sat Deepa Mann-Kler's Teenage Kicks: a quotation from the song by the Undertones – "A teenage dream's so hard to beat" – smiling down on the town in vast white letters. I rather hope Derry hangs on to this piece in perpetuity. From here, I walked uphill towards the city walls, past another piece by Mann-Kler (Neon Dogs, a collection of balloon dogs made of, well, neon), and one by RMS Design called Grove of Oaks ("Derry" is derived from the Gaelic for oak grove); constructed of electro-luminescent wire, the leaves of these trees shivered as people nearby moved. Both were underwhelming.

But then, real drama. On the wall of the former Stardust dance hall in the Bogside, Cleary Connolly's Change Your Stripes, an interactive projection that wobbled and morphed according to how visitors danced in front of it, as if they were notes, and it, a vast piece of sheet music. This work would be engaging in any city (it has already travelled to Paris and Dublin) but stumbling on it among the end-of-terrace murals for which this part of Derry is well known, it had a particular power. While those paintings are calcified, speaking only of entrenchment and sorrow, this mural was vividly alive, talking to the future, and all its endless possibilities. The only sadness was that so few had made it this far. The spot ached for happy, jostling crowds.

Back up the hill, more politics. On a contested plinth – until it was blown up by the IRA it was home to a column memorialising George Walker, the city governor who was killed at the battle of the Boyne – a simple beam of light by the Holywell Trust and the Nerve Centre. Walking the city walls, I looked down on Daan Roosegaarde's Marbles, three moulded plastic mounds that change colour when they're touched. Already covered with excited children, they seemed rather ordinary at first. But then I saw the sign "West Bank Loyalists, Still Under Siege, No Surrender". Marbles, it seemed, had been placed where, in the summer, the loyalist community still raises the biggest of its bonfires (to celebrate the battle of the Boyne). I loved both these ideas, simple and touching, but HarperMagee's Conned Fused, in which the colours of the Irish tricolour and the union flag had, on the walls of a shopping centre, been written in neon and then jumbled up, seemed naive to me. If only matters of identity were that easy.

Finally, I found myself back at the Guildhall, and it was here that I saw my favourite work, or at least the one that punched me the hardest in the solar plexus: Krzysztof Wodiczko's Public Projection – Derry-Londonderry. The Polish artist had recorded ordinary people from both sides talking about the Troubles, interviews that he was now projecting on the side of the Guildhall. The projector was housed in an ambulance, a vehicle strongly associated with the bad years, so that these confessions and eyewitness accounts could be screened anywhere, at any time. I was struck by how few local people had stopped to look and listen, but I was transfixed. Impossible to walk away from these stories of bullets and bombs, of neighbours at war, of terrible poverty, of the uselessness of politicians. Occasionally, Wodiczko would repeat a particular phrase, using it as punctuation, even as syncopation, and as the evening wore on, it was these words that stuck with me: more powerful than electricity, far brighter than any neon.