Set designers Shirin Naveed, Shankho Chaudhuri and Esha Sikander created a mini-nightclub for this year's Glastonbury festival that only played music from South Asian artists.
Arrivals is Glastonbury's first dedicated South Asian stage, envisioned by cultural collectives Dialled In, Daytimers and Going South to provide emerging musicians from across the diaspora with a gateway into the music industry and mainstream festivals.
Arrivals is Glastonbury's first dedicated South Asian stage
Conceptualised as a cinematic journey to an alien jungle planet, the stage design combines iconography borrowed from pulp classic sci-fi films and comic books within a newly redefined South Asian aesthetic rooted in politics.
"Orientalism is bedded into sci-fi," Chaudhuri told Dezeen. "What if there existed a canon of sci-fi that centred the South Asian experience" This was a way to reclaim and recontextualise a lot of those references through our own community." It was designed to resemble an alien jungle planet
The stage, set in Glastonbury's Shangri-La area, consists of an indoor dancefloor and a garden space, fronted by a dramatic facade designed to recall vintage cinema halls found across Britain and America.
A large-scale billboard was created for the entrance facade, paying homage to the styling of Indian cinemas with their neon signs and classic Bollywood posters.
"We opted for an art deco facade directly referencing the Dominion Cinema in Southall, which ...