Future Fiestas

A bottle. A plastic container. Discarded material. For award-winning Filipino artist Leeroy New, the city’s refuse becomes the genesis of another fantastical art story. 

Future Fiestas asks you to widen your imagination and draw on your inherent creativity to transform everyday materials into exuberant costumes and spectacular sculptural forms – these are the skills we need to craft alternative futures for our cities and our planet.

Drawing on Filipino fiesta traditions, where ceremony, performance, community and spectacle meet, Leeroy has worked alongside community from Blacktown to create a living artwork. Workshops invite curious makers of all ages to add their own ideas and creations. Then, sculpture steps off its pedestal to join the crowd.

What began in Blacktown travels through Darling Harbour, turning public space into a landscape of collective imagination as dancers, artists, collaborators, families and audiences engage in a joyful procession.

Known for transforming volumes of jettisoned plastic into fantastical worlds inspired by Filipino folklore, science fiction and ecology, New’s works have included Balete for the Biennale of Sydney, Balay Balete for Manila’s National Museum and Flotilla in Singapore.

Come make something strange, joyful and unexpected. Then bring it to life.