Saffron Swire reports from Shangri-La, a playground, a living, breathing outdoor art gallery at Glastonbury Festival. Words and photography by Saffron Swire.
A metal sculpture of a willow tree stands before me with ribbons for branches. Tied to the tree are hundreds of orange, pink, and yellow ribbons inscribed with messages of resilience and resistance written by women in the nearby slivers of shade. “Keep up the fight,” one reads in strides of furious black ink. “This Barbie’s job is rage,” says another, flying beside one that frankly states: “Take no one’s bullshit.”
Wind was rare at this year’s sun-scorched Glastonbury festival, but the odd gust would send these ribbons into a frenzy – a tangle of lines and statements written by women and girls clashed in the colours of sunrise. This was Threads of Resistance, perhaps the most moving artwork of the year: a towering tree installation designed by Women That Fabricate (WTF), commissioned in partnership with Amnesty International and Shangri-La. The tree served as both a sculpture and a stage backdrop, against which performers like viral poet Caitlin O’Ryan and singer Kate Nash delivered impassioned speeches throughout the weekend.
For the unenlightened, Shangri-La is a playground, a laboratory of ideas, and a living, breathing outdoor art gallery. Located in the southeast corner of the Glastonbury Festival, it was established in 2008, and this year marked its 18th anniversary. It was a celebration that took revellers back to their roots – quite literally.
This year’s theme, Wilding, explored rewilding both as an ecological practice and a personal philosophy. Sculptures sprouted from the soil. Trees became projection screens. Festivalgoers were encouraged to get down, get dirty, and “plant the seeds of change.” There was a jukebox that sowed wildflower seeds, a vintage telephone relaying strangers’ voices through the trees, and even a five-star hotel for bugs to hibernate and reproduce.
“We’ve tackled huge themes in Shangri-La before – capitalism, climate collapse – but this year was about hope,” Shangri-La’s Creative Director Kaye Dunnings told Elephant. “A collective vision of how we might live differently, regenerate, and reconnect.” This time around, she asked herself: “What can we do right now? What do we want our future to look like?”
For the past couple of years, Shangri-La was a flashy, neon-lit satire of consumer excess under the theme of Everything Must Go. It was loud, urban, brash – all flashing signs and strip lights. This year, things were quieter. More grounded. A revolution that didn’t need to be televised. Materials from last year were reworked into seating, structures, and stages. Hundreds of plants were nurtured from seed, designed to make gardening feel accessible and tangible.
“I come from a working-class background and always struggled with the art world,” revealed Dunnings, “I wanted to bring galleries to people here, in this field, and let them get their hands dirty. Let’s make art playful, not exclusive. The Chelsea Flower Show is tied up in class and royalty – we wanted to do the opposite. This show was for everyone.”
One of the highlights of this year’s theme was The Wilding AV Show, a nightly ritual in which the festival paused, and sculptural trees crafted by Trigger were transformed into pulsing, illuminated canvases. Spoken-word reflections on nature from everyday people accompanied a hypnotic set by the inclusive, queer collective Shade Cartel.
Another centrepiece was The Grow Room – a greenhouse-style bar and radical print studio powered entirely by solar energy. Inside, festivalgoers could use risographs, letterpress and collage to create protest prints and zines, while tunes from the ‘nature-restoring jukebox’ simultaneously planted wildflowers with each track you played. Artists, including Kennard Phillips and Black Lodge Press, were on hand to run workshops, teaching people that creativity is a practice for all, not something to be merely consumed.
“We live in an age of tech dominance where alternative ideas are increasingly censored by fascist tech bros like Musk and Zuckerberg,” said CJ Reay of Black Lodge Press. “Zines are anti-censorship by design. They’re cheap, DIY, and impossible to police. Since the invention of the printing press, they’ve been a tool for radical, countercultural, even dangerous ideas.”
At Shangri-La this year, ideas weren’t just printed – they were planted too. In The Allotments, twelve plots were given to artists and activists to grow installations and ecosystems of resistance. “Growing a garden is a beautiful and radical act,” Reay said, also a member of the Anarchist Gardeners Club. “Every garden grown is a hit against the suffocating boredom of grey concrete slabs, monocultures, and lawn-only backyards.” The AGC showcased companion planting techniques used by Indigenous and pre-modern cultures, teaching festivalgoers to coexist with, rather than against, the land.
In every crevice of the allotments, there was something to stumble upon. Tat Vision’s Teleshrubbies created a psychedelic mobile play-space for adults. Return to Earth by Lizzie French and Lorcan Staniland explored decay and composting as life-giving forces. Andy Doig’s Bed of Nettles offered a quiet, stinging meditation on death and renewal.
Meanwhile, Mewa – a serene, mashrabiya-inspired pavilion first exhibited at the House of Wisdom in Sharjah – offered festivalgoers a rare moment of stillness. Designed by Toby Plunkett of toyStudio, its carved wooden ribs glowed softly at night with LED lights. “Art doesn’t have to shout to make an impact,” Plunkett reflected. “Sometimes offering people a space to sit and think is the most powerful thing you can do.”
Every year, Dunnings brings together a collective of established and emerging artists to create what she calls a “wildly collaborative show.” “I design to a point,” she said, “but then I let others put their touch on it. There are hundreds of fingers and brains behind Shangri-La. It’s a living experiment in how we might live differently – and better.”
This year, that collaborative ethos extended to a-n, an organisation that supports emerging artists. One of their featured artists was Rider Shafique, whose Slave Song allotment responded to some of the earliest known interpretations of songs sung by enslaved peoples labouring on Caribbean plantations. “The slave song is the earliest piece of music from an enslaved African anywhere in the world,” said Shafique.
“Exhibiting it in different spaces like cathedrals, art galleries, stately homes – and for it to go into Shangri-La – means taking this message and history to different audiences and presenting it in creative ways so more people can experience it,” he said. “My main purpose is to start the conversation, get people thinking, see how history affects our day-to-day.”
“Some of the artists this year are making work for the first time,” affirmed Dunnings. “And they’re creating alongside established names. That’s important to me. It’s part social experiment, part act of love — watching people grow together, connect, support each other.”
Part of the magic of Shangri-La lies in its cyclability; it’s not just a spectacle for one-off consumption, but a continuing conversation. Nothing here is wasted. Everything – every light, bench, and seedling – is repurposed, stored, and will return in 2027, after next year’s fallow. Dunnings and her team are already thinking ahead. “We’re planning for 2030,” she confirmed. “All these things will still exist.”
From its print shop to its protest garden, Shangri-La didn’t just put art in front of people this year, it invited them to participate, to imagine, to ask uncomfortable questions and to conjure up new futures. In an age of hyper-individualism and endless consumption, it also stood as a radical reminder: that art can build communities, that green spaces are sacred, and that creativity, when collective, can plant the seeds for everlasting change.
Written by Saffron Swire
