In Venice, Golden Goose Opens "The Forest For The Trees” with PLAYLAB, INC.

For the opening of the 2026 Biennale Arte, Golden Goose transformed HAUS, its cultural platform in Marghera, the industrial port of Venice and the birthplace of the brand itself, into an immersive installation titled “The Forest For The Trees,” conceived by Los Angeles–based studio PLAYLAB, INC. First opened during the 2024 Biennale, HAUS has since expanded to Mexico City, Tokyo, and Istanbul, but the Marghera home remains the symbolic center. This year, it handed over its keys to PLAYLAB, INC.

Co-founded in 2004 by Archie Lee Coates IV and Jeff Franklin, PLAYLAB, INC. operates at the intersection of art, architecture, and creative direction—eleven runway shows for Virgil Abloh at Louis Vuitton, handmade music video sets for Post Malone, artwork, and installations—with a sensibility rooted in the practical, handmade, and deliberately approachable. The collaboration was fast. A couple of months from first email to finished installation. The alignment, according to both sides, was immediate.

“Everything came along so naturally,” Golden Goose CEO Silvio Campara—or, as he prefers, Chief Emotional Officer—tells Surface. “The successful angle is that we simply were ourselves.” Freedom, he suggests, is harder to handle than rules.

The installation unfolds as a processional through HAUS’s interconnected spaces. In the Piazza, visitors enter through a looping sonic landscape and symbolic gestures—throwing a leaf into a pond. They move into the Academy and Playground, where they paint and place miniature trees into a collective diorama. That model is being filmed, creating what Coates describes as an “Inception moment”—you are simultaneously inside the story and authoring it. The journey continues through a sensory Tunnel before culminating in the Hangar, where the miniature world expands into a monumental, hand-painted forest. On opening night, Michelin-starred Da Gorini curated a candlelit dinner within the installation, with flower designer Federica Carlini building an interactive mise en place inspired by the forest.

The visual language of the installation draws from an unexpected source: Tyrus Wong’s backgrounds for Disney’s 1942 film Bambi—wispy, mythical, soft. “We wanted to be able to create something that would allow local artisans here in Venice to hand-paint or handmake something that ultimately other people are part of creating,” Coates says. The reference is deliberate in its gentleness. PLAYLAB, INC. has always worked on the principle that a simple gesture can carry serious weight. Coates recalls their first runway show for Virgil Abloh at Louis Vuitton: an oversized Parisian street bench at the Place Dauphine, scaled so that front-row guests’ legs dangled like children’s. “A small gesture to symbolize a large thought,” he says. “It doesn’t mean that it’s not smart. It means that you’re putting somebody in an emotional place.”

That same sensibility runs through every room of the Marghera installation. When asked whether visitors should take a political view from the work, Coates doesn’t hesitate: “I think they should just look inside themselves. An intimate view.”

Campara sees the same impulse at the center of Golden Goose’s identity. “What they’ve done is really bringing you back to your youth, when you were still having this emotional space to feel tender,” he says. “No limits, no backdoors—simply open-minded to listen first of all to yourself and then to other people.” He frames the problem plainly: too few people listen. “Everyone tries to affirm themselves to each other. Where is the smile?”

PLAYLAB, INC. built the entire installation without visiting the space in person until the final days of production, relying on video walkthroughs and digital planning to map the processional through HAUS. “Everything at PLAYLAB, INC. starts as a conversation,” Coates says. “A peaceful, democratic conversation that can get heated at times because we care. Because you’re fighting for something to exist.”