UK: As well as an extensive music line-up, Gottwood has continued to develop the non-musical elements of the festival over the years, providing festivalgoers with a fully immersive experience from the moment they enter the site. Gottwood has now revealed its creative partners and activities for 2016.
Among the arts and creative programme is Behind This Wall – a collective of friends who have been putting on parties, playing records, flipping burgers, making drinks and curating film screenings for the last four years. Focusing on high quality ingredients, setting, music and films, with residencies at Plastic People and the Pickle Factory, the BTW crew will be building a unique woodland cinema and restaurant in the heat of the Gottwood forest.
Cinema content will be curated by Behind This Wall, and will feature screenings from Future Shorts, the world’s first ever global pop-up film festival and distribution label, and Resident Advisor – which will be showing films from its RA Films catalogue.
Hamburg-based artist and analogue synth music lover Katja Ruge will also be onboard this year, bringing the first art gallery to the Gottwood forest. In 2010 Katja started her Party Series ‘Kann denn Liebe Synthie sein?’ in Hamburg, and the nights were soon connected to photo series’ that Katja did for leading dance magazine Groove.
Pushing stage designs forward, Gottwood has commissioned custom work from both Rupert Newman and the Be Like Other People collective. Rupert has been pushing the boundaries of large-scale projection mapping across the UK and Europe for a number of years now and Be Like Other People have been making waves in the London art scene with their abstract 3D mapping techniques.
The tight knit LAZERDOME collective, which includes members of the Turner Prize-winning design crew Assemble, will be returning for 2016. The LAZERDOME will be one of Gottwood’s main stages this year – a dark and immersive laser-filled room in a visual and auditory celebration of all things leftfield.
Embarking on another new territory this year, Gottwood are working with the UK-based audiovisual performance, 3D animation, digital design, projection mapping and algorithmic art agency Derelicht, to deliver a number of live, performance-based visual installations. With its mission status being that of ‘musical integrity, sensory exploration and promotion of the electronic arts’ the time has enjoyed recent commissions for the Creators Project, Maribou State, Berlin Atonal, MiRA Festival, Seekae, Boiler Room and NTS.
Street art has always played a big part in the Gottwood live canvas, and this year the festival are pushing things forward and focusing a number of large-scale commissions with a variety of artists. Lilly, a freelance graphic designer and illustrator from London will be putting together a huge thought provoking mural running through the forest, Mikey Brain, the Birmingham-based artist who has recently exhibited across the UK and in Ibiza will return with more live abstract painting, and Greg Harris, aka I Am Space Dog, will be back for another large lakeside street art commission.
Ruff Kutz, Stamp The Wax and Gottwood will this year create a new space based around the principles of the Wayne’s World garage – with full stage set production, Moog product showcases, daytime interviews, ’80s gaming sessions and evening house parties, and takeovers from Ruf Kutz, Stamp The Wax and Dream Catalogue.
“We are really excited this year to be bringing on board so many new artists and creative concepts,” said Tom Elkington, Director of Gottwood. “We are aiming to focus as much on the way it looks as the way it sounds.”
