Jungle Gym, 2025

Terminal 1, Glastonbury 2025

Terminal 1

In a world where the lines drawn on a map by our ancestors have come to define and divide our world, this is a place without borders that celebrates our shared humanity. Unified by the simple message – NO-ONE IS ILLEGAL.

The Terminal is a deliberately slippery proposition. We are staffed by actors but we’re not ‘theatre’, we play films but we’re not a cinema, we are activists but won’t make you sign a petition. We also sell beer and dance but we’re not a club.

A walk-through situationist artwork disguised as an international airport. It is also angry. But serves its polemic with a side order of slapstick. 

About Jungle Gym

I was thrilled to be invited to contribute my work to the inaugural TERMINAL 1 in 2024 and was very excited by the plans. But nothing prepared me for what was to follow. To be part of such an inventive and effective collaboration, with other artists, performers and crew working together on making manifest so urgent a message was a profound and unforgettable experience. I feel privileged to have been invited to work closely with the inspirational team behind TERMINAL 1 this year, and hold dear the manifesto inscribed on the wall at the end of the installation last year: 

‘None of us can take credit for where we are born. None of us have the moral right to deprive our fellow humans of resources and opportunities just because they began life somewhere else. And that’s it. To hold this feeling to our hearts – whenever we talk about migration it should be from a position of kindness, humility and good grace.’
JUNGLE GYM is a response to the plight of children, the innocents in this world who have no say and no power. 


JUNGLE GYM
On entering the Cabin 3 people are confronted by a maze of chain-link fencing topped by barbed-wire zigzagging across the space in familiar queuing fashion with the odd false path and dead-end.

At the centre of the space is a classic children’s climbing frame. The first such Jungle Gym was invented in 1920 and patented by the US lawyer Sebastian Hinton. As well as a stimulus for independent play and exercise, its aim was to encourage children to gain an intuitive understanding of three-dimensional space. 

The chain-link fencing closely surrounds the climbing frame and in one of the maze’s dead-ends are stacks of children’s brightly coloured chairs. In the other is a desk with numerous pages of UK Home Office asylum and immigration forms piled high, including prominently the phrase next to a tick box: ‘I have read and understood the destitution message.’ People are considered destitute if they have not been able to meet their barest physical needs to stay warm, dry, clean and fed.
A clock’s hands revolve through 24 hours every 4 minutes. In this accelerated day and night, the space is lit harshly for 2 minutes then in darkness for 2 minutes. In the light we hear the joyous sounds of many children at play. In darkness there is silence.

The walls are painted 100% Cyan, the official colour of UNICEF. 
A nine-digit counter adds another migrant to the worldwide total every 12 seconds. 


NOTES:
CYAN is, in fact the colour of water, which in large volumes absorbs more red light than blue light, resulting in a bluish tint. Increased scattering of blue light by particles in the water can shift the blue towards green, creating the characteristic cyan colour. 

In the subtractive colour system, or CMYK colour model, which can be overlaid to produce all colours in paint and colour printing, CYAN is one of the primary colours, along with magenta and yellow.

Link for further information.