Glastonbury '24: design secrets of the festival's first South Asian space

One of the biggest buzzes at this year's Glastonbury wasn't any of the acts shown on TV. Instead, a small section in the site's southwest corner saw the launch of the festival's first dedicated South Asian space.

Nestled in the heart of the Shangri-La area – which I wrote a live report on from the event itself – this small but significant stage served as a gateway for emerging musicians from across the South Asian diaspora to enter the mainstream music industry.

It was a worthy aim, especially at a festival popularly stereotyped as overwhelmingly white and middle-class. But it also could have backfired dramatically.

After all, there's a thin line in the popular imagination between giving people opportunities and ghettoising and patronising an entire section of society. So when I spoke to Shangri-La's organisers, they all expressed the importance of giving the community direct control of the creation and development of the space.

Consequently, Arrivals was conceptualised by an entirely South Asian team and designed in collaboration with Dialled In, Daytimers and Going South, three organisations committed to platforming South Asian creative talent.

As a result, these eye-catching aesthetics took an inventive and refreshing approach to depicting the spirit behind the space. Rather than wallowing in cliches, they combined elements of pulp sci-fi with a reimagined South Asian aesthetic, helping to break down stereotypes and present a fresh, forward-thinking perspective around the performers.

So I was keen to chat with set and graphic designer Shankho Chaudhuri and learn more about the thinking behind it.

Concept and design

He explains that it all began with a Zoom call between Shankho, architects Shirin Naveed and Esha Sikander, and two of the founding members of Dialled In, Ahsan-Elahi Shujaat and Dhruva Balram. "They told us about the joint production and that our mission would be to develop the creative vision for the space," recalls Shankho.

Their starting pistol came from DJ, presenter and Going South founder Bobby Friction, who shared a collection of reference images steeped in classic sci-fi. These were essentially psychedelic dreamscapes remixed with the textures and motifs of old-school Bollywood, a mashup of nostalgia and futurism.

"Those initial mood boards raised the question: 'What is the South Asian presence in sci-fi?'," Shankho recalls. "When the answer to that came up short, it gave us the impetus to imagine our own parallel dimension, one in which there existed a hugely successful movie franchise, with a South Asian aesthetic and sensibility proudly at the centre. We asked ourselves, 'What if we were the heroes of our movies?'."

The team then proceeded to build up an audience journey made up of three distinct stages. "We'd greet the audience with a facade that evoked the architecture of vintage cinema halls, complete with our own five-metre wide billboard, evoking the kind of giant outdoor marketing that often accompanies big blockbusters," explains Shankho.

"They would then enter our tent and find themselves inside the film. And then they would exit to find the garden where they could gather, rest and play before jumping back into the music."

Illustration and aesthetic

The team knew very early on that they wanted to work with illustrator Osheen Siva. "She creates these amazing pieces that explore surrealism, sci-fi, decolonised dreamscapes and narratives of queer and feminine power," says Shankho. "She'd be responsible for creating the billboard for our imaginary film, and we'd then use that as the basis for building out the stage design and aesthetic across the space."

By the time they approached Osheen, the group had narrowed the vision down from "every possible science fiction aesthetic" to something a bit more focused. "The idea was growing of a jungle-coded world that bridged natural and technological worlds together," says Shankho.

"Esha had found this incredible reference of sound systems in West Bengal that were giant, colourful speaker stacks held together by truss and rope in areas of high vegetation, which then unlocked a cascade of references drawing from lots of different mediums: the video game Horizon Zero Dawn, the art of Moebius, Studio Ghibli, the recent Krakoa run of X-Men comics, Gorillaz' Plastic Beach, old posters for Super Metroid, etc."

These were shared with Osheen as a prompt. "And she, in her infinite patience and talent, took this chaotic library of ideas and began cooking what became the first lineup poster featuring the tiger and the billboard featuring the three characters. I then took on a supporting graphic design role, placing Osheen's artwork in our posters and socials required for the festival and coming up with the Arrivals logo and brand. "

"What I love about Osheen's artwork," he adds, "is that she blends all of these visual legacies into something that feels both familiar and totally new because the subject matter and characters are of the like we haven't seen before. It's really inspiring, and I had the most fun finding the logo design that would complement her work, diving into that personal canon."

Cultural significance

Shankho makes an interesting point in that this old-school aesthetic feels quite refreshing in the cultural landscape of 2024. "I think we're currently in an era of very clinical, hyper-real science fiction, in which everything is perhaps too perfectly realised," he believes.

"As soon as you inject some of the camp back into it," he adds, "or even just turn up the saturation of colours, it immediately feels nostalgic because we associate that vividness with the likes of Flash Gordon and Barbarella. Don't get me wrong, much of modern sci-fi is firmly in my personal canon, but there is something joyous about returning to the kind of maximalist graphic styles that Osheen creates."

He adds that many details in Osheen's work speak to a wider cultural significance. "There's the central character's sari-armour. The banana leaf motifs across the arms of the left and right characters. The patterning on the clothing references traditional ikat fabric or the Kolam pattern in the left headscarf. You see traits of Mughal architecture in the face mask for the right android character and the stylings of the space guns.

"All of this, combined with some of the most fantastic colour work, left us all in awe," he adds. "When she presented the billboard design, it was such a bolt of lightning that all of us ran faster and further."

Set design

Next came the task of taking 2D designs and making them work in three dimensions. "We'd set ourselves the idea that you'd be entering the film, and so that really demanded that we considered the space in a 360-degree manner," Shankho explains.

"We'd decided early on that if we could make it happen, we'd place the DJ in the centre of the space to create a more communal experience. I could devote pages to shouting out our producer Ahsan and his ability to perform miracles – the lighting setup he pulled together with the team at Neuron AV, alongside the talents of our LDs Cheesy and Shaun and ops Scott and Somin.

"Add to this the incredible sound system that Vedic Roots Soundsystem built specifically for the space, which are beautiful structures in their own rights, with added design led by Esha, and we'd already created a very active space just through the tech alone."

That just left two main tasks: the DJ booth and the tent walls. Osheen's artwork inspired a loose narrative for the film: the idea that the central characters were rebels on a jungle planet, broadcasting pirate radio waves to resist a hyper-capitalist empire.

"This was our loose reference to the Everything Must Go theme of the wider Shangri-La site and its commentary on consumerism and capitalism," says Shankho. "This grounded us in location and style, and thus, the concept of the DJ booth as a kind of organic motherboard for the sound system was born, as well as the idea to try and create a panoramic graphic vista for the walls.

"I am by no means an illustrator," he adds. "But guided by Osheen's brilliant character work and support from Shirin, I managed to build out the vista of jungle backgrounds we could then drop her characters into. Getting this artwork into the space was only possible because of the incredible skills and generosity of Dr. D, a.k.a. Subvertiser, who made pasting up our graphics across the walls of the space a dream."

Melting pot

I visited the set on its opening day as a group of excited journalists gathered, a rare sight at this southeast end of the festival. In my mind, the aesthetics worked brilliantly, partly because the design didn't try to bite off more than it could chew and tried to represent the whole of South Asian culture.

Instead, says Shankho, "We tried to plant our own tiny flag in the sand to experiment with the aesthetic idea of 'South Asian'. Rather than speak on behalf of the diaspora – an impossible task – we just leant into our own patchwork quilt of references and inspirations. We trusted that our inherent identity as South Asian artists would give us enough cultural currency."

Indeed, what excites Shankho about the movement of South Asian artists at the moment is that: "it feels like we're seeing the maturing of a generation that didn't always have direct role models in the arts in Britain, and so formed their creative identity through a plurality of different and unexpected sources.

"You can see this in the programming of the stage, where the styles of the artists span genres: there's garage, hip-hop, dub, reggae, jungle, and yes, some Bollywood," he continues. "This is reflected in the space: we all come from different backgrounds and disciplines as artists, and there's a whole melting pot of styles in the space. So as our generation gains power, influence, and networks, we're seeing all these unexpected fusions of ideas that push the needle and redefine any preconceived ideas of what the umbrella of 'South Asian' art could possibly mean."

Asian references

That's not to say, of course, that there aren't nods to cultural genealogy. "The graphic style doesn't just owe its lineage to Western comics, but also the kinds of graphic design you can find all over packaging and branding in South Asia," he explains.

"The stage design is a direct reference to the Raj Rewal Hall of Nations and the architectural movement of tropical modernism that can be found across India. The garden space is informed by Islamic architecture and the material exploration of weaving techniques inspired by the Punjab region.

"The architectural flourishes of the facade, meanwhile, directly reference the Dominion Theatre in Southall: the cinema outside which 18-year-old Gurdip Singh Chaggar was fatally stabbed in 1976, prompting years of British South Asians fighting back against racism.

The Future of Arrivals

Overall, Shankho's hope is that Arrivals is merely the first of many such efforts to platform and support marginalised groups across the festival scene. "There are so many groups that are already out there, and hopefully, we can serve as an example that it's not only possible but can also be magnificent," he enthuses.

He's keen to add that Arrivals didn't just appear out of a vacuum; it's the culmination of years of work by the community to showcase the talent that already exists out there. "And we are absolutely standing on the generations that came before us to pave the way. That's as true for us as it is for the many other communities that are still kept out of the mainstream festival circuit. So hopefully, this will act as a gauntlet for the wider festival scene to go out, find them, and then empower them to make spaces on their own terms."

But he stresses that this is only possible with true, meaningful support. "We owe a great deal to the team at Shangri-La, who really made us feel welcome throughout the build process. I'm hugely grateful to creative director Kaye Dunnings and build manager Willy Brothwoood," he says. "Both of them held us all with such care through the many anxious Zooms in the months leading up to it. Arrivals was only possible because of true collaboration and allyship."

Finally, he hopes Arrivals will serve as a catalyst for the conversation around representation, to move beyond the hypervisibility of who is on stage through to creative and backstage roles too. He ends by saying: "One of the most moving parts of this whole journey was looking around on the morning before we were opening to the public and seeing a technical and creative team that not only showcased the breadth of the South Asian diaspora but also contained a true plurality of disciplines and artistic backgrounds. We're here; we're ready, we're hungry for it. I promise you, there's much more to come."