The Mad Hattar's Rania Hattar on What Björk Can Teach Brands

Earlier this month in Hafnarfjörður, Iceland, I walked into Björk’s Echolalia experience looking for seams, cracks in the foundation, a sign that anything had gone awry. I can’t help it; I’ve been working in experiential since before it became something every brand wanted a piece of. It’s hard for me to let go of that part of my brain and become an audience member 100%.

I was all in, almost immediately.

Echolalia is Björk’s exhibition at the National Gallery of Iceland and part of her larger eclipse festival. You might be picturing a typical museum with marble floors, soaring ceilings and seemingly endless square footage. In fact, the National Gallery of Iceland is a relatively ordinary looking old house with three floors, and it’s home to some of the most effective experiential work I’ve seen in 20 years of working in the field.

None of it hinged on flashy spectacle. It all stemmed from the artist knowing exactly what they wanted you to feel and building the rest of the experience from there.

That’s the chicken-and-egg conundrum our industry keeps getting backward. With Echolalia, I found proof that when what you want the audience to feel comes first, no one has to gild the lily, and the concept carries the day.

Ask questions that actually matter
Before you approve your next brief, ask: do we want the audience to feel it or see it? Spoilers: the answer should be “feel it” (this is a pass/fail question, sorry). Once that feeling gets specific, you can reverse engineer it within whatever budget constraints you have. Working backward, the build will reveal itself, and with it, some untapped brilliance you would have never stumbled upon otherwise.

In this dark house, Björk didn’t have the room to build walls, even if she wanted to and had an astronomical budget.

More on Ad Age!