Follow your gut #1 - Team up with your friends! - The journey of a stage design

The journey of a stage design

A good friend of mine (Freddy, I love you for this) is organising a festival every year. It is quite a decent festival with 3000+ visitors, it is mainly art, concerts and a lot of DJ´s. I have been there the previous year and had a wonderful time. In the beginning of the year, I was told that they were looking for a collective to build and design the scenery for one of the stages. So Freddy asked one of my best friends and me, if we were interested in submitting a design proposal.

The Fuchsbau Festival

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The two of us had no idea what we were doing, but it sounded like a great idea to just try ourselves out. We had a lot of fun, building a little model and doing a few drawings, this is what we came up with at the beginning:

While we were doing this, we knew that we would have to gather more people to make this happen. So we connected with my cousin who is an architect and he was able to supply us with some more ideas and sketches. We were asking around for friends to help and we came up with 10 volunteers in a matter of days.

So we had everything we needed, the people and the plan. The next day, we were submitting our proposal to Freddy.

It took them a few days to reply and the two of us actually did not really count on it since we knew, that there were other, more experienced collectives applying for the job. But Freddy and his team really liked our ideas (and the fact that Freddy is good friend of mine, might have helped a little too) and we got the job.

Awesome. But what the f*ck are we doing here?

None of us had any idea how to tackle a project of this size. We still had to come up with a name for our collective. Fittingly we came up with "Kollektiv Keine Ahnung" which translates to "Collective no idea".

With the exam period coming by, we were all pretty busy and trying to figure out how to make this thing happen. We had no idea of the safety regulations of such a project and had to do a lot of research. We had to preplan all of the materials, calculate the costs, gather the tools, get a car and still come up with a realistic concept since our proposal was nice to look at, but practically impossible to build at the location. We had planned to have a net of ropes above the head of the visitors but soon realised that the material was too expensive.

It was three weeks until the festival started and I was beginning to panic a little, a little much. Everyone was counting on me, I had a shitload of work to do for uni and still had no idea what I was actually trying to build.

I came up with the main idea after visiting a really exciting art installation in Berlin. It was called "The Haus", they invited over 100 artists into an old bank building at Kurfürstendamm, Berlin. Every single room was an art installation, a lot of creative input. This is the homepage but it is already all over. The building got demolished after the temporary exhibition.

So I had the main idea, but still did not solve the problem with the ropes, I did a lot of research and found this awesome company.

Oh wait, is this our installation? ;)

I connected with Mr. Popp, who proved to be an awesome contact. He produces awesome, glowing-in-the-dark-textile-bands. I offered him to send him pictures of the installation which he then could use on his homepage and he managed to give us quite a decent discount on our pretty big order.

Phew, we made it. Got the people, got the materials and managed to have the tools.
This turned out to be the hardest part. The building process was a lot of hard work too, but we had the idea settled and great support from our very experienced visual-artist, Matze.

If you ever need a light guy in Germany, this is your man.

In the end, the people I gathered, were family (thanks to my brother and cousins) and really good friends as well as a few new faces.

Let me tell you this, it is unbelievable what a bunch of good friends with a vision can achieve. I would have never believed how well we worked together, everyone did an amazing job. It was really interesting to see the dynamic of the team growing from day to day.

In the following pictures/videos you can see the building process of the project:

It was a long road, but the feeling we got from this project was indescribable. It was such a pleasure to see people appreciating your work. The feeling of achieving something with your friends and sharing those amazing moments. I met a lot of special people and the feedback we got was overwhelming. We are definately going to do it again, in the coming year.

Follow your guts and great things will happen, never underestimate what you can achieve with good friends and a lot of positive energy.

Thank you, Fuchsbau. Much love to all of my friends.

genius_loci

Music is a big part of my life and with every post I do, I would like to share some of my gems. Let me introduce you to the one and only, HUNEE.

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