Marshmallow Laser Feast ︎
Therme Euskirchen ︎
The multi-sensory experience, developed in collaboration with art collective Marshmallow Laser Feast, invites visitors to step through a waterfall and embark on an immersive journey into the heart of the Amazonian rainforest. With a spatial narrative compressing a day's journey in the rainforest into a 24-minute experience, Forest Bathing, Lapuna invites participants into a tropical downpour, where rain machines, mist, and spatial audio saturate the senses in a sensory cleansing white noise. Participants are then invited to recline in temperature-controlled and vibroacoustic circular furniture, gaze upwards at a projection depicting a majestic kapok (lupuna) tree against the backdrop of the Amazonian sky, later transforming into the ephemeral and majestic Queen of the night flower housed high within its branches, and bathe in the rainforest, their bodies rooted into the floor of the forest, their toes dipping into the springs gushing through.
Inspired by the Japanese tradition of ‘Shinrin-yoku’—or 'forest bath’, coined in the 1980’s as one of the best practices for physical and mental well-being—the installation creates an open-eyed meditation and encourages a symbiotic relationship with nature.
It marks a new approach being explored increasingly lately in experiential well-being. It invites visitors to explore their inner space by beckoning their senses and enabling a sensory reset and a reconnection with nature, a reconnection to their bodies in nature.
It aims overall to restore sensitivity and feeling, an antidote to the clicking, typing, and swiping plagues of our time. It also aims to restore awareness and empathy and allows us to ground ourselves again, all while encouraging a collective moment of stillness.
Most importantly, this viscerally crafted storytelling, powered by cutting-edge technology and grounded in proven science, aims to reconnect humanity to our senses, our own human technology.
Forest Bathing, Lapuna is an interdisciplinary expansive experience par excellence.
Spatially, it is inspired by gymnasiums and hammams, places for collective care and learning; it follows simple round shapes that represent purity, timelessness, and sacredness.
Water, a source of calmness throughout our human history, is quite present throughout the journey; people gathered by water for survival and still habitually do, which is why it became a recurrent element throughout our experience.
The full materiality in the spaces is tactile and responsive; vibroacoustic heated furniture engulfs the visitors as well, allowing for a sense of collectivity, with everyone sharing this experience simultaneously. The scale of the seating in relation to the projections allows visitors to encounter a different space every time they recline on the seats; depending on where they sit, the auditory, olfactory, and visual experience is different with every visit.
This is all supported by a three-dimensional sound field, calming bespoke floral brushstrokes by Scentronix, as well as a diurnal light change in media but also in space, in a familiar and intuitive way throughout the 24-minute experience. Technologically innovative, Forest Bathing, Lapuna combines 5k projection, a 55-speaker spatial sound environment, all choreographed together to transport visitors to the rainforest.
Commissioned by the Josef Wund thermal spa group, this approach looks beyond the individual and instead imagines the future of well-being as a physical, natural, and social ecology and will be a permanent feature of the wellness offering at Therme Euskirchen.
Special thanks to all project partners and subcontractors:
WernerSobek | MEP planning
InSynergie | AV integration
HB-Laser | Experiential Water Features
VelaPulsar | Fit-out
Scentronix | Scent Design & implementation
SpaceFounder | Furniture/lillypad fabrication
PoolSystems | Pool Basin
Acosorb | Acoustic Ceiling
Gaiser | Ventilation Systems[
Oliver Oepen | Electrical systems
Atzwanger | Plumbing & WaterFiltration systems