Project Partners: Festival Republic, Kirsty Taylor and Flora Mackeddie

Project Brief: The Latitude Festival is an annual music festival that takes place in Henham Park in Suffolk, England. The family friendly festival first started in 2006 and has run with an environmentally conscious agenda ever since.

The brief was to create a large public installation that would attract festival goers to a less visited part of the site, the ‘Far Away Forest’. The installation would provide space for entertainers such as comedians, tarot card readers and magicians to perform whilst users gain an experience which takes them on a journey through the forest.

Our Services: Brief development, Concept Design.

In collaboration with Latitude Festival, we created a design for a public experience installation. The structure was designed to take visitors on a journey through the Faraway Forest area of the Latitude Festival site. As users explore the space, they will pass through multiple layers, each creating a different visual and sensory experience through the use of light, material, scale and smell. Through each transition they will be transported further away from the main festival site and discover a hidden world within. Hidden within the installation will be entertainers, such as magicians, tarot card readers and artists.

Made entirely from reclaimed, sustainable or afterlife materials, the installation is intended to leave no lasting footprint on the site for which it is proposed. Elements that cannot be fully recycled will be reused through donation of part of the installation to a local school. Designed to be assembled and disassembled in a matter of days, the installation's main structure will be made from standard scaffolding- synonymous with much of the festival's stage sets and lighting rigs. Clad with a semi transparent material mesh, the structure from afar will appear as a visually intriguing and alien form amongst the trees and undergrowth. As users approach, silhouettes from within will become clearer, drawing in more visitors and encouraging interaction between people. The centre of the secret world's walls will be formed with hay bales to create a striking and massive centrepiece, which will rise above the outer shell.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the festival was forced to postpone and so the installation is yet to be realised- for a future Faraway Forest experience!

We'd like to thank Kirsty Taylor and Flora Mackeddie from Festival Republic for their time and efforts in pushing this project forwards.