New Penny Woolcock Installation Set For The Roundhouse

If you live in London, or any other major city, you will be able to see first hand the effects of gentrification. Consumerism and inequality is also rampant and can be seen just about everyday in the homeless man asking for spare change outside a building site that's laying down the foundation to a new set of luxury flats. This August, Bloomberg Summer and The Roundhouse will be presenting a large art installation by Penny Woolcock that focuses on such issues, as well as education, crime and social media. Block9, famous for creating extravagant fantasy worlds for Glastonbury Festival, often comprising of grand scale tower blocks, tenements and tube trains, will be working alongside Woolcock.

Utopia, the new art installation that will take over the main space of The Roundhouse will be a multi-sensory world. It will allow audiences to travel through a diverse neighbourhood of city life in an immersive soundscape environment. Utopia will be peppered with stories collected by Woolcock in interviews with residents across the social spectrum – from drug dealers, gang members, former offenders and sex workers to the homeless, the elderly, housewives and university graduates. In order to collect the interviews, Woolcock worked closely with participants from the Roundhouse's creative programme for 11-25 year olds to find and interview local Camden residents. One of the participants has become a paid assistant on the project. Others have become some of the voices heard in the installation. Young people from across the programme will also perform at the installation's evening event which are still to be announced.

Utopia opens from the 4th-23rd of August, tickets are £10 (£5 for 16-25s) with a 'Pay What You Like' every Tuesday. For more information visit the Roundhouse website here.