Overview
The Forest for the Trees is an interactive installation conceived by PlayLab, Inc. for the third edition of Golden Goose HAUS in Marghera, on the industrial edge of Venice, opened during the first days of Biennale Arte 2026. PlayLab turned the former warehouse into a walk-through storybook, hand-painted by Venetian artisans, and April produced the whole thing. April brought us in to compose the soundtrack and design the sound across the space.
The route
Visitors move through the building as through chapters of a story. In the Piazza they drop a paper leaf into water. In the Academy and Playground they paint miniature wooden trees and add them to a growing collective diorama. A tunnel of projected light leads out of the workshop, and the route ends in the Hangar, inside a full-scale forest of painted trees on castors, lit by candles and spotlights.
Sound
Our job was to make PlayLab's real-life fairytale sound like one. We wrote a set of modern classical compositions that nod to the scores of the golden age of animated features: string writing, woodwind figures that shadow movement, themes small enough to hum. A chapter of the score belongs to each locale, so the material heard at the entrance returns, transformed, in the forest.
Around the score sits a layer of sound design meant to make the forest setting feel alive: a slow, open bed in the Piazza, a light touch in the workshop areas so the music sits under conversation, woodland sound moving with the projections in the tunnel, and a diffuse, immersive environment in the Hangar, where the illusion is meant to be complete. Everything loops unattended for the run of the exhibition, and the seams between rooms are hidden on purpose.
Credits
- Concept and installation: PlayLab, Inc.
- Presented by Golden Goose HAUS, Marghera, Venice, during Biennale Arte 2026.
- Production: April.
- Soundtrack and sound design: Hidden Mountain.
- Photos: April.
