Next Wave is a biennially curated youth arts festival. We were entrusted with communicating the festival’s theme ‘Empire Games’, a provocative reference to the original name of the Commonwealth Games, and a title conjuring up paradoxical notions of ‘politics and play’. Using styrofoam, balsa wood and modeling clay we physically built a series of retro-futuristic island dioramas. These islands were intended as literal representations of colonization and settlement while drawing parallels to youth culture today and eighties platform games.
