Lighting up the Forest for Change – London Design Biennale

This June the Forest for Change – The Global Goals Pavilion – is featuring at the centre of the London Design Biennale and and we are delighted to be involved in the lighting of it. This forest of 400 trees will bring to life the solutions needed to achieve the Goals, showing that they are the answer to address climate change, growing inequality, and the recovery from Covid-19. Bringing trees into the courtyard at Somerset House for the first time is a bold statement that mirrors the audacious nature of the Goals.

Designers Sabrina Fiorina and Matthew Allen-Olivar have designed a lighting scheme to add some light into the darkness of the forest. A selection of our Kew spotlights and Hampton floodlights were selected to achieve the effects.

Es Devlin, Forest for Change designer and Artistic Director of the Biennale, was told that trees had been forbidden from the courtyard at Somerset House when the building was originally conceived 250 years ago. When designing this year’s Biennale, Es decided to “counter this attitude of human dominance over nature, by allowing a forest to overtake the entire courtyard.” In subverting the rules of Somerset House’s Enlightenment-era designers, Es and her team considered the transformational nature of forests in literature to create a place of real change: “The UN Global Goals offer us clear ways to engage and alter our behaviour and it is our hope that an interaction with the Goals in the forest will be transformative.”

You’ll be able to wander through the enchanted forest and discover all about the Global Goals and how you can take action in support of them, in a way that’s never been seen before. The forest is accessible without an admission ticket, or you can purchase tickets for the Biennale which runs from 1 – 27 June.