At this year's Glastonbury Festival in England, held the last week of June, French artist Olivier Grossetête's giant cardboard tower, at more than 18 meters high, was the main feature of the festival's Theatre and Circus area and was built completely from Smurfit Kappa (Ireland) corrugated boxes. Based on the iconic Glastonbury Tor (a hill in Glastonbury, Somerset, England, that features the roofless St. Michael's Tower and forms an iconic part of the local landscape), the tower was constructed with the aid of festival-goers young and old over the whole festival weekend under the instruction of Grossetête.
The tower is a progression of Grossetête's 2012 "roofless" program first seen in Ayrshire at the Burns an' a' that! Festival, and in Glasgow at the Merchant City Festival, that also used Smurfit Kappa boxes. The "roofless" street art towers that Olivier will build in the U.K. will all be rebuilt as part of a cardboard city he is creating in Marseilles in September 2013.
1,600 corrugated boxes were manufactured by Smurfit Kappa Barnstaple from B.C. twin wall, kraft exterior corrugated board, each measuring 480 x 240 x 960 mm. The boxes were supplied to Glasgow based organizers UZ Arts (who presented Grossetête and InSitu, the pan-European network that originally commissioned the project with support from The Arts Council of England).
Grossetête, 30, specializes in monumental sculptures constructed from everyday materials that provoke his audiences to reconsider the complexity and beauty of materials taken out of their intended practical context.
Patrick Sweeney GM of Smurfit Kappa Barnstaple, said that "if rock and roll is king, then corrugated is definitely the castle. The Tor Tower Olivier and the fans built was stunningly beautiful, immensely strong, and in keeping with Glastonbury's sustainable positioning, can of course be recycled in the normal waste recovery stream."
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