From a living room in Dublin to St Patrick’s Cathedral. Two years documenting an arts gathering that refuses to disappear.
Arts Bubbles is a roaming arts event created by Matteo Colombo in Dublin. It brings artists and audiences into the same room, often without a stage, without a fixed format, and without the usual distance between performer and viewer. Music, poetry, painting, movement, spoken word and conversation all sit together in the same space.
Van Rose started filming Arts Bubbles in Matteo and Carlotta’s apartment during Arts Bubbles 4. A living room full of plants, rugs, pillows and warm light. Artists sharing work a few feet from the people watching.
That first shoot became the beginning of an ongoing collaboration. Over time, Arts Bubbles moved through different spaces, different themes and different groups of artists. The work kept growing, but the feeling stayed the same. Intimate, temporary, alive.
By Arts Bubbles 20, the project had reached St Patrick’s Cathedral. A project first filmed in a living room had grown into one of Dublin’s most recognised historic spaces, and somehow it still felt personal. That was the full circle moment.
Arts Bubbles 4 was the first event we filmed. The setting was Matteo and Carlotta’s apartment in Dublin. On the surface, the brief was simple: capture the event.
What we were actually trying to communicate was the feeling of walking into something private, handmade and quietly powerful. It was not polished in the conventional sense. It had texture, warmth and risk. A room full of plants, rugs, pillows, paintings and people sitting close together, giving their full attention to whoever was sharing work that evening.
The approach was observational. We focused on the room, the closeness, the light, the small gestures and the way the artists and audience seemed to breathe together. The event did not need to be pushed. It needed to be watched properly.
Clip coming soon
After Arts Bubbles 4, the collaboration continued across different editions. Each event had its own theme, space, artists and rhythm. Some were quieter. Some were more intense. Some leaned more into music, others into spoken word, movement, painting or collective performance.
The creative challenge was to make each piece feel like part of the same world, without making the same video again and again. The visual language needed to hold the identity of Arts Bubbles while allowing each gathering to have its own atmosphere.
We looked for the moments between the performances. People arriving. Shoes coming off. Artists preparing. A room shifting from casual conversation into attention. The silence before something starts. The release after it ends. That is where Arts Bubbles lives.
Arts Bubbles 20 took place at St Patrick’s Cathedral as part of Culture Date with Dublin 8. The theme was Human Measures: A Voyage Through Shifting Perspectives, inspired by Gulliver’s Travels and the idea of scale and how our sense of self changes depending on the world around us.
This was the largest symbolic shift in the collaboration. The project had started in a living room. Two years later, it was inside one of Dublin’s most recognised historic spaces. The temptation with a space like St Patrick’s Cathedral is to overplay the grandeur. But the story was not “look at this building.” The story was that the same human energy from the living room had survived the move into a much larger world.
The visual approach was built around that tension. Architecture and intimacy. Scale and breath. Public space and personal connection. The cathedral as a vessel, not just a backdrop.
Clip coming soon
This piece became the personal tribute film within the collaboration. It was not made as a standard promotional video. It was written as a memory.
The film tells the story of the first time Mike met Matteo and Carlotta, the first Arts Bubbles shoot in their apartment, and the later full circle moment of filming Arts Bubbles 20 at St Patrick’s Cathedral.
It is a client story, but it is also a record of what Van Rose looks for in a project. The moment where an idea stops being theoretical and becomes real in front of people. Something that started small. Something that could easily have disappeared. But didn’t.
The work with Arts Bubbles sits close to what Van Rose cares about most. It is not content made to fill a calendar. It is documentation of something with a pulse.
Arts Bubbles is fragile by design. The audience is close. The artists are exposed. The space matters. The silence matters. The small reactions matter. The camera had to stay respectful. The work needed to capture the atmosphere without flattening it into event coverage.
Each Arts Bubble exists for a short time, then disappears. The documentation became a way of proving it happened.
Visually, the work balances warmth and polish. It keeps the handmade feeling of Arts Bubbles, while presenting it with enough care to reflect the value of the project. The result is not traditional event coverage. It is a growing visual archive of a cultural idea becoming real.