The start of the eighth edition of the Macau Light Festival, scheduled for Saturday, has been postponed to December 9, the authorities of the territory announced this Friday, which is facing a new outbreak of Covid-19.
Macau’s Directorate of Tourism Services (DST) said the postponement was due to “preparatory issues” for the festival, which this year has a new name: Illuminate Macau 2022, according to a statement.
The Chinese special administrative region, which registered 21 new cases of Covid-19 in the last week, announced on Wednesday a round of rapid antigen tests for the entire population, for three consecutive days, which ends this Friday.
The festival, which would run until January 1, includes four three-dimensional ‘videomapping’ works, one of them created by the Portuguese group Ocubo Criativo – Artistic and Literary Activities and another by a group from Shanghai, in the east of China.
The Chinese Health Commission announced that it had registered almost 35,000 new cases of Covid-19 in the last 24 hours (including some 31,700 asymptomatic), one thousand fewer than those registered on Wednesday.
In a presentation to the press in November, DST said that the work of the Portuguese team, dubbed “Integration Starting Point”, would be exhibited on the façade of the São Francisco Church, on the island of Coloane, and would “present the history of Macau”.
Ocubo Criativo has already presented work in France and Finland and was responsible for the opening ceremony in 2019 of Al Janoub, the first stadium built from scratch for the 2022 World Cup, which takes place in Qatar.
The Portuguese group will not be present in Macao “due to the epidemic situation”, so the work will be delivered via the Internet, with MGTO providing “equipment and technical personnel to help with the projection”.
Since March 2020, anyone arriving in Macao, with the exception of people entering from mainland China, must comply with a quarantine at hotels designated by the authorities, currently set at five days.
The festival will spread to eight areas of the territory, including casino hotels on the Macau peninsula and in Cotai (a strip of casinos between the islands of Taipa and Coloane), as the six gaming operators were “invited, for the first time, to collaborate,” DST said.
Source: TSF
