Henrique Ghersi on building worlds for music, performance and INSTALLATIONS
In this conversation, the London-based visual director, designer and studio founder reflects on shaping live experiences across architecture, spatial environments and large-scale installations, bringing moving image, physical space, technology and performance into the same world.
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Spectacle can hold attention, but Henrique Ghersi is more interested in what gives it meaning. Whether he is creating visuals for a live show, an architectural space, or an experience that changes in real time, he starts with the same questions: what should it feel like, and what is it trying to say?
That thinking runs through his approach to worldbuilding, collaboration, and technology. In this conversation, Henrique reflects on moving from hands-on design into creative direction, building visual systems that can respond to music and performance, and why narrative and emotion come before spectacle. He also discusses working with artists including Arca and Tokischa, using AI and real-time tools as part of the creative process, and protecting curiosity as the work becomes larger and more complex.
D: Which artists, filmmakers, architects, writers, musicians, or experiences have most shaped how you think about image-making, storytelling and worldbuilding?
Henrique:
I spent a lot of my childhood looking at reproductions of Picasso paintings in my grandparents’ home. This was before the internet, so I would sit with them for long periods, especially Guernica, studying every figure and detail. I didn’t understand its history then, but I could feel that it was violent, tragic and heroic. As I grew older, I came to understand how deeply the Spanish Civil War had affected my grandparents and wider family, who emigrated from Spain to Venezuela. It made me realise that some of what I had sensed in the painting was also present in my own family. In that sense, cubism introduced me to the idea that multiple perspectives can exist simultaneously, something that still finds its way into my work.
Seeing a Miró retrospective as a kid was equally eye-opening. I was fascinated by how colour, form and space could create emotion or become almost like a window into somewhere else. I found that same feeling years later in the work of theatre director Robert Wilson. I was always drawn to surrealism and magical realism, particularly Dalí, Remedios Varo, Buñuel and García Márquez. Their work takes a familiar world and shifts its logic until it feels completely different, like an alphabet out of order.
Music has always been fundamental. Artists like Madonna, Björk, Nine Inch Nails and Mecano showed me that you could build an entire universe around your work, each album and tour a reflection of that. μ-Ziq and Aphex Twin’s textural, experimental and playful approach to sound inspired qualities I often try to translate visually. Music videos opened the door to cinema. Through artists I loved, I discovered directors like Spike Jonze, Mark Romanek and Chris Cunningham, whose strong concepts and visual language were hugely formative. That eventually led me to study film and discover Fellini, Kubrick, Kurosawa and German Expressionism. Almodóvar was particularly important. His films were heightened and theatrical, yet always felt deeply human. They were tragic and funny, artificial and completely truthful at once. His queer characters felt lived-in rather than symbolic.
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D: Over the last decade you've evolved from designer and artist to creative director and studio founder. How has your practice changed, and how do you cultivate creativity across such different roles?
Henrique:
I see those roles as extensions of the same. I’m still trying to understand the world of the work, find its essence, and communicate it visually, spatially, and emotionally. Earlier in my career, the process was more solitary and hands-on. I was often designing or animating directly, so many decisions happened privately and instinctively. As the scale of the work grew, I started thinking beyond individual images and more about the complete experience: how it unfolds over time, how it relates to music, performance, set design, architecture and technology, and how those elements form a coherent journey. My role now often involves holding that wider picture across many departments and collaborators. But I still need the private part of the process: time to research, listen, gather references and immerse myself in the subject before guiding other people through it.
The biggest change is that I no longer feel I need to make every frame myself. My responsibility is to establish the central idea, build a visual and emotional framework around it, and stay close enough to the making to recognise when something feels authentic to the project. The scale may change, but the questions remain the same: What are we trying to say? What feels truthful to the subject? And how can we turn that into an experience people can enter and feel visually?
D: You move through different creative ecosystems: your own studio, independent collaborators, and collectives like TOML. How has that shaped the way you approach collaboration?

Henrique:
Moving between my own studio, other studios, independent collaborators, and more collective environments has taught me that collaboration cannot follow one fixed model. Each project creates its own temporary ecosystem, with different personalities, disciplines and ways of thinking.
When I’m leading through the studio, I have a responsibility to create clarity: to establish the intention of the work, communicate it across the team and make decisions when they’re needed. I think directing requires both conviction and receptivity. You need a strong enough voice to stand behind an idea when it matters, but you also need to listen, respond and let go when someone brings something that serves the work better. The aim isn’t to protect every original idea. It’s to protect the essence of the project while allowing its expression to evolve. Communication becomes a creative process in itself. Ideas move between the artist or client, designers, animators, choreographers, producers and technical teams, and part of my role is to translate between those languages. Shared research, visual boards and open conversations help everyone remain connected to the same world without prescribing exactly how each person should contribute.
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D: Your work feels less like collections of content and more like living systems with their own visual language. What draws you to worldbuilding, and how do you balance narrative, emotion and spectacle?
D: You've worked on projects ranging from Arca's Coachella performance to Coldplay's Music of the Spheres and Eurovision 2023, each operating at immense scale. What matters most in creating an emotional world, not just a visual spectacle?

Henrique:
Worldbuilding has become increasingly important to me over the last few years, not because I’m interested in creating fantasy for its own sake, but because I think worlds allow us to experience something real from a different perspective. There’s nothing more fascinating than entering a world, whether it is similar to ours or completely different, only to see something real reflected back at us.
Once I feel I understand the essence of a project, I start thinking about the visual language that can support it. Building systems rather than individual images allows the work to evolve while everything still feels connected to the same world. When it comes to balancing narrative, emotion, and spectacle, emotion and narrative always come first.
Henrique:
Spectacle on its own is usually forgettable. What people remember is meaning: the moment when a visual connects to an artist, a piece of music or an idea in a way that feels emotionally true and like a natural extension of the world of the musician, the play or the installation. On a recent project with Tokischa, large sculptural body parts weren’t there simply for spectacle. They belonged to her visual universe while also exploring broader ideas of identity, sensuality and the meanings projected onto the body. The scale created the spectacle; the ideas gave it resonance.
Technology, real-time systems and visual effects should amplify an idea, not replace it. People rarely remember the biggest screen in the room. They remember whether a moment resonated with them, and that’s always what I’m trying to create.
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Eurovision Song Contest 2023 - Creative Lead & Lead Video Designer: Henrique Ghersi
with NorthHouse Creative
Tokischa 2026 Tour - Content Direction & Design: Henrique Ghersi Studio
D: Your work often sits at the intersection of architecture, performance, and moving image. How does thinking about physical space influence the way you approach visual storytelling?
Henrique:
I don't see moving image as something that simply sits on a screen. I see it as something that shapes the way we experience a space. Whether it's a concert, theatre production, museum installation or architectural project, I'm thinking about how visuals can compress, expand or redefine the environment around them. I often think about sculpting the stage itself. Movement, colour, light and composition can make a space feel intimate or suddenly vast. Designed alongside architecture, lighting and scenography, their boundaries begin to disappear.
A recent project that explored this was The Henderson, a Zaha Hadid-designed building in Hong Kong, where I worked with 59 Studio as Design Director. The challenge wasn't simply to create visuals for screens, but to develop a visual language that responded to very different spatial experiences throughout the building, which included LED screens embedded in the façade of the building as well as screens in the various common areas, including lift lobbies and the top-floor ballroom.
The façade is viewed across the city, so the content focused on more accentuated colours and animation, giving it a stronger sense of rhythm. On the other end of the spectrum, people could stand less than a metre from the interior screens, so the visuals became quieter and almost imperceptible, more like living paintings than digital displays. The rhythm changed with the viewer's relationship to the space. Whilst the different screens and spaces required a different approach, they still needed to live within the same concept and art direction of the whole project.
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The Henderson by Zaha Hadid - Design Director: Henrique Ghersi, with 59 Studio / JOURNEY
D: Could you talk through one of your recent projects and the elements that helped define its world and visual direction?
Henrique:
One recent project that captures my process is the visual concept and show visuals I developed for Tokischa. From the beginning, I wasn’t interested in creating spectacle for its own sake. Every visual element needed to feel connected to her identity, her music, and her body of work. We explored symbolic ideas rather than thinking about visuals in isolation on a track-by-track basis. I began by immersing myself in Tokischa’s world by researching her music, music videos, and previous shows. I took note of visual elements that kept recurring throughout her work, including symbols in her music videos, grillz and her overall visual language. Through conversations with her, ideas around transformation and ritual began to emerge. The first part of the show evolved from those ideas, juxtaposing wedding motifs with elements such as latex, ice, thorns, warm light and metal. Those contrasts became the visual language that defined the opening of the show, which was all about a shifting transformation.
After that transformational moment, the show shifted into its more celebratory section, where the body became a recurring theme, not simply as something provocative, but as a way of exploring identity, sensuality, power, vulnerability, femininity and the meanings people project onto the human form. It felt like a natural place to go visually after the ritual and transformation, moving into a moment of celebration and confidence. That evolved into shifting sculptural body parts that appeared as backdrops throughout the second half of the show. The same body part could remain present across multiple songs, while beat-driven lighting states gave each appearance its own look, responding to the rhythm and energy of the music.
I brought together a team of collaborators that felt right for the project. For example, it made sense to collaborate with female artists such as Render Fruit on the sculptural body parts, helping to keep both the process and the final result as authentic to the subject as possible. Alongside presenting updates to Tokischa and her team and directing the collaborators, I also created some of the visuals myself and gave everything a final pass to ensure the show felt coherent as a whole. Throughout the process, I kept asking the same question: what is this visual actually saying? By the final concept, the body sculptures no longer felt like set pieces. They had become part of the narrative, so every decision, from scale and composition to movement and lighting, had a reason for being there.
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Tokischa 2026 Tour - Content Direction & Design: Henrique Ghersi Studio
D: You've worked with Arca on one of her most significant live performances, Coachella.
D: What made that creative relationship unique, and how did you shape something deeply personal into an experience that could resonate with thousands of people?
Henrique:
Working with Arca felt unique because we share an upbringing and many of the same cultural references. That gave us an intuitive understanding of one another, but more importantly, it allowed us to explore ideas that resonated deeply with both of us. One of those ideas was the duality of media and technology. Growing up, many of the values surrounding us felt restrictive, particularly for people who didn’t fit conventional ideas of gender and sexuality. Yet it was through technology and the internet that we were able to tap into music, cinema and television, discovering artists who made us feel seen, showed us there was another way to exist and connected us with communities beyond our immediate surroundings. On the other side of that, technology and media can also be used to control, surveil and influence us.
That tension became one of the emotional foundations of the show. The first act explored the internet through surveillance, fragmentation and systems of control, using monochromatic, high-contrast imagery and automated, pre-programmed camera sequences. From there, the show gradually opened into vulnerability and softness in Act 2, where Arca performed the more intimate, downtempo songs, incorporating more handheld camera and cinematic, desaturated grading. The final act arrived at a place of community, presence and celebration, where the visual world shifted into high-energy, vibrant prismatic colours. That journey and those themes are deeply personal to Arca, but we hoped they would resonate with others too. The more specific the story became, the more universal it had the potential to feel.
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Arca Coachella 2025 - Co-Creative Lead & Video Design Director, Henrique Ghersi
D: If you could speak to your younger self at the beginning of your creative journey, what would you tell them?
Henrique:
If I could speak to my younger self, I'd probably tell him not to take creativity so seriously. Whatever you're loving now, the music you hear, the films you see, the joy and playfulness you feel - don't dim it or hide it. Own it and run with it. Make art.
For a long time, I felt every creative decision had to justify itself professionally. Every project needed to be sophisticated and every idea had to help build a career. Looking back, I think that pressure got in the way of something much more important: play. As a child, I was constantly making things simply because I enjoyed imagining them. Somewhere between formal education and trying to establish myself professionally, I began separating creativity from curiosity. I wish I'd trusted that instinct more.
I'd tell my younger self not to wait for permission or certainty. Make things because you're curious. Follow ideas before you know where they'll lead.
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D: AI and image-generation tools are beginning to reshape visual production and live creative workflows. How do you currently see AI fitting into your own process?
Henrique:
I've always been drawn to new technologies, so I don't see AI as a sudden disruption. It feels like the latest chapter in a much longer evolution. I started in visual effects as digital cinematography was becoming mainstream, then moved into real-time systems, live technologies and generative workflows. Each shift opened new creative possibilities. AI can generate assets, textures and references, help build environments and streamline pipelines. Those efficiencies are valuable, but they aren't what excites me most. What interests me most is how AI accelerates exploration. It allows us to iterate faster, test ideas we might never have had time to pursue and arrive at stronger creative decisions. Rather than giving me answers, it expands the design conversation.
I've always enjoyed pushing tools beyond their intended use. In Notch, sometimes I like to connect nodes in unexpected ways and push their values until they almost break. That's often where interesting things happen. Imperfections and glitches can feel more human than a perfectly controlled result. AI has similar potential to reveal visual territories just beyond the familiar. I explored this on Danny Ocean's Reflexa tour, where for one song’s visuals AI helped create surreal, shape-shifting aerial landscapes that felt rooted in reality while remaining slightly unfamiliar. It wasn't replacing the creative process; it opened another way of seeing and imagining.
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Danny Ocean Reflexa Tour - Video Design & Live Camera Treatments / Notch, Henrique Ghersi Studio
D: Projects like Danny Ocean's Reflexa Tour and Bakar festivals rely heavily on live camera treatments and real-time systems.
Henrique:
I’ve always been fascinated by live camera because it allows audiences to experience a performance in ways they couldn’t with their own eyes. In a large venue, there’s something incredibly powerful about seeing the energy of the entire stage while, at the same time, being brought into an intimate detail: a profile, a gesture, or a facial expression. That relationship between scale and intimacy is something I find really interesting. Treating the live image in different ways, making it more textural or even cubist, also creates the possibility of experiencing multiple perspectives of the performance at once. An example of that was Arca’s Coachella performance, where I designed the camera direction and placement of more than eight cameras, including cameras embedded within the modular columns, overhead positions, and handheld cameras. Together they created a cubist view of the performance, with different perspectives existing simultaneously, which aimed to expand on the idea of self states that Arca explores through her work. Some transitions were driven by an automated camera system that responded to the intricacy of the music, while others were cut live by hand during the more organic moments of the show.
What interests you about using these technologies as part of the storytelling itself?
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Gang of Youths Arena Tour 2022 - Video Design & Notch Design: Henrique Ghersi, with E F Studio
Henrique:
Traditionally, rendered content and live camera have been treated as two separate elements. Live camera magnifies the performance, while the visuals create another world around it. What excites me is bringing those two together, so the live image becomes part of that world rather than existing outside it. It can sit inside digital environments or abstract compositions, becoming another layer of the storytelling. Real-time tools like Notch allow visuals to respond as the performance unfolds. Instead of something fixed, you’re designing a living system that evolves with the music, lighting, and performers, making every performance slightly different.
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At Azimuth in AlUla, a project I worked on with FRAY Studio, we developed a real-time visual system in Notch that could be performed live. Certain parameters, such as colour, speed and duration, could be controlled by the lighting operator in real time, while other gestural elements evolved continuously through procedural modifiers we built into the system. The result was that the visuals remained organic, responsive and constantly changing throughout the two-day festival. In those moments, technology stops feeling like a tool and starts behaving more like another performer on stage: responding, adapting and contributing in real time.
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Azimuth, AlUla - Video Creative Direction, Designer, Project Lead & Notch: Henrique Ghersi, with FRAY Studio
D: Looking across your work, are there themes you find yourself returning to repeatedly, even when the projects appear very different on the surface?
D: How do you think about the relationship between visual design, technology and human emotion?
Henrique:
A handful of ideas keep returning in my work. One is circularity. I'm drawn to journeys that return to where they began, but where something has shifted along the way. It might be a change in perspective, emotion or understanding, but I love the feeling of ending somewhere familiar that now feels completely different because of everything that happened in between. We move through cycles and revisit places, relationships, and ideas, but we never quite return as the same person. I'm also fascinated by transformation and by seeing the same moment from different perspectives. That's one reason live camera has become important to my practice. I'm interested in capturing a performer, a space, or a moment from multiple vantage points, allowing the audience to experience something that couldn't exist from a single point of view. On Scenario, a multimedia dance piece I created in collaboration with choreographer Daniela Neugebauer, I explored this through multiple automated cameras following the performer that composited together to create textural visuals of the live feeds.
Visually, I'm drawn to sculpting space: using content to compress or expand the stage, blurring the boundaries between lighting, set and video, or shaping depth through colour and shadow. All of these themes come back to the same fascination: how something familiar can be experienced differently after a journey.
Henrique:
Human emotion informs the concept. Visual design gives that concept form. Technology allows it to be experienced in new ways. Technology is never the starting point for me. I begin by asking what something should feel like, what it’s trying to communicate, and what kind of experience it wants to create. From there, the visual language begins to emerge, and only then do I choose or develop the technology that can best serve it. When the order is reversed, the work can become impressive but emotionally empty. When technology disappears into the idea, it has the potential to create something people genuinely feel rather than simply admire.
D: What books, films, artworks or creative experiences have stayed with you over the years and continue to influence your thinking today?
D: If people want to reach out and collaborate with you on a project, where can they find you?
Henrique:
I've also always been drawn to work that refuses to sit comfortably within one discipline. Seeing Fuerza Bruta for the first time was thrilling. It blurred theatre, dance, installation, concert and immersive experience, and showed me that memorable work often happens between established categories. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time later inspired me through its seamless integration of projection and stagecraft into the narrative. I'm inspired by Andy Goldsworthy, whose temporary works made from ice, stone, leaves and branches embrace time, transformation and impermanence. His work reminds me that change isn't something to resist.
Henrique:
Through henriqueghersi.com or on Instagram @henriqueghersi.
Henrique Ghersi is a member at TOML Collective → See his artist profile
Written by Debora Deva
Debbie is a writer, art director, and multidisciplinary creative at TOML Collective. With a background in advertising, she brings fresh perspectives to the journal — aiming to educate, question, and spark new ideas.
Get in touch with debora@tomlcollective.com