Collusion
An outdoor temporary exhibition
CHA was commissioned to design a series of pavilions for Collusion 2019, a multi-disciplinary and immersive exhibition in Cambridge exploring the relationship between art and technology. The exhibition featured interactive works by six artists housed in freestanding pavilions.
Our design needed to provide a coherent external identity for the exhibition located at Cambridge Junction, a busy public retail space, and to be robust, weather-proof and engaging enough to attract the passing public.
An additional challenge was the immersive nature of the artworks and how to create a set of appropriate individual interior environments to accommodate these.
Our response was to design what we dubbed a ‘digital village’; a small, temporary settlement of similar but subtly differentiated ‘objects’. Effectively, each pavilion is a small, outdoor cinema, autonomous and yet part of a family.
The pavilions have roofs that slope in different directions so that each appears to address a different corner of the square in which they sit. The shape of the pavilions is both abstract and subtly figurative, with extended parapets suggesting signage and a desire to communicate.
The use of everyday and industrial materials references the often faceless places of making and production where the emerging technology explored by the artworks is often produced. Each is clad in a combination of corrugated metal and birch-faced plywood so that, materially, they sit somewhere between the shed and the light industrial unit: spaces
Colour has been used to lend the pavilions a playful, decorative quality both in the corrugated metal and the coloured screw caps which offer a suitably pragmatic form of ornamentation.
