REFUGIUM 3.0

A Shelter Within Intensity

REFUGIUM 3.0 is an audio-reactive spatial installation created by the SZUM collective for the closing night of Unsound Festival - a place between scenography, sculpture, light, image, and the ritual of club presence.

The installation expands the idea of refugium as a temporary shelter. Yet this is not a shelter understood as an escape from intensity, but as a way of entering deeper into its centre. In a space saturated with bass, moving bodies, and pulses of light, a place of focus emerges - a digital campfire around which the energy of the night condenses.

REFUGIUM 3.0 does not separate the viewer from sound, crowd, and light. On the contrary - it allows them to become one material. It is an environment in which music takes on a spatial form, light begins to breathe, and human presence becomes part of the image.

Bodies as Landscape

In this iteration of the cycle, the audience does not remain on the side of the spectators. It becomes a living part of the installation - a moving, pulsating landscape inscribed into the composition of the stage. Flooded with monochromatic light, the audience ceases to be the background of the event and becomes its matter: mass, rhythm, surface, from which the image emerges.

The boundary between artist and audience becomes blurred. The stage is no longer the only centre of the event - the centre shifts between bodies, light, sound, and gazes. The installation functions as a shared organism, responding to the collective energy of the space.

The movement of the crowd, the density of presence, gestures, and the tension of bodies are incorporated into the visual language of the project. What usually remains outside the stage becomes part of the composition here.

Sculptures of Light

The physical structure of the installation consisted of two spatial sculptures placed symmetrically on the left and right sides of the DJ booth. Their steel constructions formed a framework for light that responded to the sound and dynamics of the performances. Light was not used as decoration - it became the nerve of the installation, its breath and pulse.

Together with the music, the sculptures changed their intensity, rhythm, and character. At times they appeared as luminous fissures, at others as glowing structures surrounding the stage. Together with the screen, sound, and audience, they formed a space that was more experience than scenography.

An Image Generated from Presence

The second layer of REFUGIUM 3.0 consisted of real-time visuals generated from 3D scanners. One scanner captured the performing artists, while the other captured the audience. Their silhouettes, movement, and presence were processed into abstract digital forms - images created not from a fixed animation, but from what was happening in the moment.

As a result, the visual layer of the installation became a record of living presence. Bodies became signals, movement became image, and the audience co-created the digital form of the event. Each set generated a different structure, a different density, and a different rhythm of the image.

Closing Night

REFUGIUM 3.0 accompanied performances by Sega Bodega, Lee Gamble, Tocco Toro, and Hekato. Each performance moved the installation in a different way - activating light, image, and space differently. Sound was not only heard, but seen and felt as a changing, shared architecture.

The project continues the REFUGIUM cycle - SZUM’s search for a temporary shelter, a digital campfire, and a space of collective focus. In version 3.0, refugium becomes a place created not despite noise, crowd, and intensity, but precisely from them: a space that, for a moment, gathers dispersed bodies, lights, and sounds into one shared rhythm.