A.Wake

The Body & Soul Festival had been a fixture in Ireland's cultural calendar for 21 years—first at Electric Picnic, then as its own event at Ballinlough for 15 years. Over two decades, it had built a devoted community who returned year after year. But rising costs made it increasingly difficult to maintain quality at B&S's scale: too big to be boutique, too small to compete with the major players. The founders wanted to evolve what the festival was and the decision was made to close. Rather than fade out quietly, they chose to give it a wake.

We leaned into Irish funeral traditions, with keening playing across the digital experience and language that carried the tone: Let the body be still, let the soul be free. To launch the campaign, we deleted all content from Body & Soul's social accounts and replaced them with black posts, as if the festival itself was in mourning. There was no line-up announcement, no conventional festival marketing. Instead, the campaign focused on memory and ritual. To apply for tickets, people submitted a story from their time at the festival, which would later be burned at the event itself as a final act of letting go.

The visual identity used film and photography from previous festivals, playing with fragments of memory so people could see themselves reflected in the work. A portal device held everything together—beginning with sombre tones and static compositions, then gradually becoming more colourful, dynamic and layered as the campaign evolved toward the event itself. The approach divided opinion—some questioned a festival with no headliners, while others understood it immediately. That tension reflected a central question: what makes a festival matter? The line-up or the people and community who gather? A.Wake sold out, the stories were burned and Body & Soul ended on its own terms (for now).