Volunteering at FESTA 2014

 Cinema screening with Treehouses for Swamp Dwellers Sculpture on the left

Over Labour Weekend this year I volunteered at FESTA 2014 (Festival of Transitional Architecture). FESTA is the only festival of it's kind in the world and it aims to bring people back into Christchurch city centre "with a diverse, engaging programme of creative urban renewal and a major large-scale ‘live architecture’ event."

I helped out at three events over the weekend, Picture Palace Parade, CityUps and Dematerialization. Picture Palace Parade was a tour of historic cinema sites around Cathedral Square. The tour finished with an outdoor cinema screening of Heavenly Creatures, which was filmed in Christchurch. The movie was projected onto a wall at an empty building lot in the city centre. I enjoyed the venue, particularly as most outdoor cinema in other cities takes place in parkland. To enjoy some outdoor cinema in a
gravel-ly lot felt very Christchurch, it was a cool setting.

CityUps was the main event of the FESTA programme for this year. Architecture students took over two blocks of the city centre and to build massive installations which represented their vision of a future Christchurch. I had a lot of fun volunteering with a Wellington-based street games crew.

The final event I volunteered at was Dematerialisation. Created by three Melbourne-based architects, from the outside it looked like a big wooden box, stood in one of the many vacant lots in the city centre. Inside a film was projected onto a wall that had been shot in an identical wooden box in Australia, the idea being that the box was almost a portal between the physical world and a virtual one. You watched the film with special glasses with one eye covered, which intensified the effect as it made depth harder to perceive. An interesting project.

Watching Heavenly Creatures

Dematerialisation from the outside 

Inside Dematerialisation