Guerilla Science

June 19, 2011

Glastonbury: June 22-26

Working with legendary Glastonbury architects and curators Strong And Co, Guerilla Science will bring a Decontamination Unit to Shangri La – Glastonbury’s two-storey after-hours pleasure city of sin and sleaze. This forms part of the Wellcome Trust’s gorgeously grimy Dirt season of events.

Shangri-La this year will be stricken by an outbreak of a “virus” that can be spread via touch, contaminating and maddening all who come into contact with it. The walls of the slum-land alleys will be covered in invisible UV paint, creating a visual means to “infect” tens of thousands of people, and creating two groups: the contaminated and the clean.

The only way to achieve purity, cleanliness and salvation is through the Decontamination Unit, a tightly controlled zone of disinfection.

At the entrance, guests will pass through a tunnel lined with flat screen televisions projecting images of viral outbreaks provided by the Wellcome Trust, before they encounter a Microbial Zoo: a menagerie of the flora and fauna of the human body, from the gut to the ear to the vagina.

Microbiologists a will assess the contaminated revelers for signs of infection, and determine if they require moral or physical decontamination.

One route leads to counselling with a team of bona fide psychiatrists, who will prepare revelers to enter the Shame Drain, where they will be able to purge themselves of dirty secrets to a voice recorder positioned inside a black box.

The other: physical purification, complete with a strip-down, a chemical spray and biohazard suit.

After winding their way through our cleansing chambers, the purified will exit through a skywalk onto the pristine second level of Shangri La, having escaped the world of filth, and embarking into a brave, clean new world.