Decontamination Chamber
A large scale immersive installation designed to reconnect audiences with dirt at Glastonbury Music Festival for the Wellcome Trust.
Festivals can make you filthy – physically as well as mentally. To cleanse the muddy revellers of Glastonbury, the UK’s biggest music festival, Guerilla Science created the ‘Decontamination Unit’: a gigantic white cube containing a hidden network of chambers filled with psychiatrists and microbiologists.
This large scale immersive installation blended science with theatre and role play. Microbiologists introduced visitors to their internal ‘dirt’ – the bacteria that call us home – via a microbial ‘zoo’ – a brightly lit installation of a hundred multicolored petri dishes containing these bacteria. Visitors were offered either physical or psychological decontamination, following seperate routes through the installation. The psychological route involved a short consultation with psychiatrists and the change to spill a ’dirty secret’ to be broadcast anonymously across the Shangri-La field, whilst the physical route involved removal of contaminated items and an encounter with a Health Protection Agency hazmat suit wearing ‘cleaner.’ Once cleansed, visitors could ascend the Skywalk, a suspended walkway traversing Shangri-La to survey the filth below.
Decontamination Chamber was commissioned by the Wellcome Trust and delivered with Strong and Co as part of Wellcome’s Dirt Season, a series of events intended to encourage people to ‘welcome dirt back into their lives.’
To create the Decontamination Chamber, we collaborate with Caroline Methuen, Gavin Humphreys, Joe Latimer, Mark Salter, Priscilla Kent and Public Health England.
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