Earth to Southbank.
Luke Jerram’s
Gaia comes to the Royal Festival Hall for a special late-summer weekend, suspending a seven-metre Earth above the stage and letting visitors see the planet from a rather different angle. Built from detailed NASA imagery, the touring artwork recreates the Earth in three dimensions and is designed to provoke the ‘overview effect’: the shift in perspective astronauts describe when looking back at the world from space.
Jerram has long worked between sculpture, installation and live art, often using spectacle to smuggle in questions about planetary health. This can be seen clearly in
Gaia – what is beautiful from a distance is unsettling the longer you stand beneath it, as the planet appears both monumental and perilously suspended in the room.
Southbank Centre is also pairing the installation with music. On Friday 28 August,
GAIA floats above the BBC Concert Orchestra for
Sounds of the Earth, a strings programme including Vaughan Williams, Hildur Guðnadóttir, Dobrinka Tabakova, Barber and Arvo Pärt. On Saturday 29 August, Eric Whitacre brings
Eternity in an Hour to the same stage, an electro-choral performance made for the glow of Jerram’s Earth.
On Sunday 30 August, the installation opens to the public, with a surround-sound composition by BAFTA award-winning composer Dan Jones playing alongside the sculpture. Seen from below,
Gaia turns the Earth into something to marvel at and care for. A stunning reminder that the world’s beauty is not separate from its vulnerability.
