The city of Ghent has created a light installation to honour the writer Maurice Maeterlinck. Located on the Predikherenlei waterfront, it features dozens of small blue birds settled on a canalside tree.
The work was created by the French design studio Pitaya for an edition of the Ghent Light Festival. The little blue birds that glow in the night sky were inspired by Maeterlinck’s fairy tale L’Oiseau bleu (The Blue Bird).
Born in Ghent in 1862, the Belgian writer with the difficult name settled in Paris, where he created mystical plays that thrilled French audiences. His story Pelléas et Mélisande inspired a work by Debussy. In 1911, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. But his works eventually fell out of fashion.
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