If you asked us in 2019 to predict the festival fashion staples of 2020, facemasks and headphones would probably be last on our list. But COVID changes everything, as you surely know. With the world upside down, Denver’s Acoma Street Project — one of the first pandemic-era music festivals — seems sure to turn the facemask-headphone combo into a style staple for our troubled times. One day, your grandchildren will open up their history books (via brain-based uplink, obvi) to see these photos and learn how, even during a global pandemic, their grandparents’ generation just couldn’t stop partying.
The Acoma Street Project is an open-air, six-week, limited pop-up music festival — featuring live-streamed performances and live spinning from DJs around the world in an outdoor setting. It features an immersive art-walk that festival-goers take turns exploring in small groups and a 26ft 4K LED wall for the type of festival visuals that pair so well with electronic music (and, you know… drugs). Each week, the Acoma Street Project invites new talent to perform for small groups of fans under strictly enforced social distancing guidelines. These parameters include mandatory mask-wearing in certain sections of the 5,000 square foot space, crowd limits, and rules against intermingling.
Photos from the event show small parties at distanced booths spread throughout a parking lot — a setting that sort of resembles the VIP section of a pre-pandemic music festival. For the most part, folks look like they’re having fun, but from the outside, we have to admit it looks a little bizarre (and not quite as euphoric as what the festival scene typically fosters). Still, we may be seeing a lot of festivals like this going forward as we wait out a vaccine for Covid-19. Obviously this isn’t a situation to take lightly — Denver county currently has 12,515 cases of Coronavirus and 440 deaths as of September 22nd, Colorado has a total of 65, 936 coronavirus cases and 2,031 deaths, and the United States as a whole has counted 6.88M cases of the coronavirus and over 200k deaths.
To find out more about the Acoma Street Project head to Nightout.
