Get Involved, Internet: Fund a 30-foot-tall lightning bolt memorial for David Bowie

By Matt Gerardi  |  February 21, 2017 | 10:00pm
Aux Features Music

A team of artists and engineers are hoping to crowdfund £990,000 (approximately $1.23 million) to erect a permanent three-story-tall memorial for David Bowie in the late pop idol’s hometown of Brixton. The statue would be a tremendous recreation of the iconic red and blue lightning bolt from the cover of Aladdin Sane and will be placed across the street from the Brixton tube station, right next to Jimmy C’s Aladdin Sane mural. The project is led by This Ain’t Rock ’N’ Roll, a London-based design and branding firm that says it’s working in consultation with Bowie’s teams to make the colossal tribute happen.

The artists have also started up the non-profit David Bowie Memorial charity to help keep the space clean, and brought on a number of structural engineers to figure out just how the hell you’d keep a giant stainless-steel zigzag from tipping over and crashing through Morley’s department store. They expect construction and installation to take somewhere between six and nine months.


The funding itself is being handled on a U.K.-based site called Crowdfunder. As of this writing, the campaign has only raised approximately £19,000 and has 28 days to bring in the remaining £971,000. Plenty of backer rewards are in place to help entice those pledges, like pins, shirts, replicas of the statue, and prints of Bowie-related work from several different artists.

[via Pitchfork]

 
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