Festus is an annual festival of ambitious & experimental collaborative projects between RCA Sculpture students and external partners.

Festus

The Altruistic Artist with Denise de Cordova

Altruism: a selfless concern for the well-being of others. Is this definition realistic in today’s interconnected global landscape? Can we better understand it through the lenses of social exchange theory, the empathy-altruism hypothesis, and the norms of reciprocity?

Contemporary Psychologists have different interpretations of altruism:

Proto altruism – biological in origin, maternal and paternal nurturing.

Generative altruism – non conflictive pleasure, fostering the success of others.

Conflicted altruism – conflict resolution.

Pseudo altruism – a defensive cloak for underlying sadomasochism.

Are new words: compassion, conviviality, empathy, hospitality, mutualism and collectivism better suited to understating altruism in relation to sustainable artistic practice? Are artist led initiatives such as @theamberroomart and @quenchgallery (both creations of recent RCA Sculpture Alumni) indicative of future altruistic developments in the many art words that now coexist?

With these questions in mind, "The Altruistic Artist" is a Festus project hosted by Standpoint Gallery. This initiative will include a series of workshops and talks featuring invited alumni guests, including Rosie Reed, artist and curator who has created the Amber Room.

Standpoint is a vibrant community of artist practitioners, distinguished for its educational programs, residency opportunities, and exhibitions, including the Mark Tanner Annual Sculpture Prize. The resident artists play an integral role in creating and facilitating opportunities that foster altruism, ultimately benefiting the creative visions of others. We are excited to collaborate closely with Emma Kelly, the curator and administrator for the Mark Tanner Award, and to utilize the on-site facilities and resources provided by the talented practitioners within this community. We will be based in one of the ceramic studios at Standpoint, working with Will Papworth.

10.00am – Introduction to the community at Standpoint.

2.00pm - A ‘surgery’ with Rosie Reed and planning for the exhibition event in the Hangar Space at the Royal College of Art in December.

All day ceramic workshop with Will Papworth. Clay will be provided, and there will be an opportunity to hand build, use the wheel and develop work.

10.00am – Finish ceramics ready for firing.

Relevant reading – Marcel Maus – The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies.

The Altruistic Artist

NESTING: (MIS)PLACEMENT, (DIS)EMBODIMENT, (RE)NEGOTIATION, (RE)IMAGINATION, AND (RE)DIRECTION

What do you mean when you say you’re “going home”?


Is home a warm shelter,
A hazy memory,
A history long buried,
A person once loved,
A body renewed,
A childhood dish,
A familiar scent,
A worn suitcase,
A one-way ticket?


Or, in fact, a place you can never return to?


Shall I,
Can I,
May I sing you a lullaby?

NESTING is an invitation to explore the themes of otherness, in-betweenness, misplacement, and radical embodiment through the lens of diaspora. Led by Whiskey Chow, the project unfolds the many layers of identity—how it’s constructed and realised, how world-building can create space for survival and belonging, and how marginalised lives navigate between collective memory and personal experience.
Through exhibition viewings, deep conversations with peers and curators, and workshops offering a safe space for personal and political discourse, brainstorming sessions, and independent experiments, we will take an intersectional approach—to listen, to understand, to share, to care, to create, to nurture, to evolve, to show, to amplify voices often unheard, and to reveal what has remained unseen.

12-14 November: Museum/gallery visits, curator tours, workshops, introduction, brainstorming, and discussions

10-11 December: Install NESTING in the Hangar Gallery, RCA Battersea

12-13 December: NESTING exhibition and group crits with industry guests

2025: Self-publishing/zine-making opportunity (TBC)

(Please come with an open mind and full commitment to the scheduled engagements)

LAP-SEE LAM: Floating Sea Palace
@Studio Voltaire
https://studiovoltaire.org/whats-on/lap-see-lam-floating-sea-palace/

RIAR RIZALDI: Mirage
@Gasworks
https://www.gasworks.org.uk/exhibitions/riar-rizaldi-exhibition/

LAUREN HALSE: emajendat
@Serpentine South Gallery
https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/lauren-halsey-emajendat/

Inside/Outside and All in Between
Curated by 5 community curators: Arber Gashi, Amalia Syeda Aguirre, Ching Wong, Khevyn ‘BE’ Ibrahim, Tunu Brown
@Migration Museum
https://www.migrationmuseum.org/exhibition/inside-outside-and-all-in-between/

Image credit: Lap-See Lam, Floating Sea Palace
2024 Installation view at Studio Voltaire
Images courtesy of the artist and Studio Voltaire
Photo: Andy Keate

NESTING

For Festus 2025, The Royal College of Art's Sculpture School is excited to announce a unique collaboration with 'LIFT', a movement, balance, and strength studio located in Shoreditch, East London.

Titled 'ENCOUNTER', this project invites 15 students to engage in an interdisciplinary research exercise of physical engagement, embodied performance, and sculptural enquiry. Participating students will attend three bespoke classes at LIFT, specifically designed for them. Requiring no prior experience, these classes will take place Tue 12th, Wed 13th and Thur 14th of November, with an open public reception of student artwork on Sunday the 24th of November.

The classes are crafted to enhance our understanding of biomechanics and our sense of being in space and time, breathing, moving, engaging muscles and sensing. These are concepts that are integral to both being and art making. Students will be required to propose an artwork inspired by the project concept and classes. Instead of creating 15 individual works, they will collaboratively produce a body of work consisting of 15 chapters or scenes. We will discuss this plan in a series of seminars around the classes, where students will be expected to have read assigned texts and present research material to the peer group. The project will be more suited to artists wishing to explore performance and moving image, but not exclusively.


How would we create such encounters and what would they ask of us? The evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar described to me how over millennia, human beings had developed particular habits and rituals that had been proved to speed up bonding between people who didn't have much in common. At the top of this list are singing, dancing and eating together. (The empathy gap: why don’t you meet people who think differently to you? Douglas Alexander, Guardian, 2017)

There is something powerful in Minimalism's move of denying the artist's hand and the concomitant refusal of the artwork as an autographic expression of the artist's psychology or, indeed, as referential in any way. Instead, Judd, Andre, Morris, et al., opened the meaning of the sculptural encounter to viewers and their real-time spatial and bodily relations. (Queer Formalisms: Jennifer Doyle and David Getsy in Conversation, Art Journal, No.4, 2013)

The New York fitness prophet, eugenicist, and tycoon Bernarr Macfadden, for instance, first encountered physical culture through immigrants in Missouri, (SCULPO, ERGO SUM, Jörg Scheller, Harvard Design Magazine, n.d)

‘To understand its impact one must recall that the orthodoxy of the age was that psychiatry should be a natural science and therefore ruthlessly objective. R.D Laing reminded us that the subject matter of psychiatry is not only the experience of the patient but that of the psychiatrist; both are embodied subjects, to use Eric Matthews' phrase, and the clinical encounter is a meeting between persons. He criticised the neutral stance of the psychoanalyst and Freudian theory which, like the Medusa's head, turned the terrors of the unconscious to stone. It was this humanising of the clinical situation which won him many adherents among patients and those who identified with them. (On Laing's The Divided Self, Sandy Robertson, Cambridge University Press, 2018)

When modern humans reached Europe about 50,000 years ago, they encountered Neanderthals who had lived across Europe and western Asia from more than 200,000 years ago. (Natural History Museum, souvenir guide, n.d)

E N C O U N T E R

Founded in 1901 by Frederick John Horniman, the Horniman Museum is known for its display of anthropological artefacts, stuffed animals and musical instruments. The collection is arranged in cabinets categorised by continent: Asia, Europe, South/North America, Africa, Oceania. It represents an attempt to understand people from different cultures: what is important to them, what is at the centre of their lives, what governs their existence and development. Traditionally, the anthropologist enters a culture to examine its systems of behaviour and how it differs from their own culture. But in our contemporary globalised world cultures now share many things. The Horniman’s anthropology exhibit is thus an historical idea of cultural difference: the perspective of a European white man. It is interesting to consider what an African or Asian Horniman Museum might look like. Would it contain the same things as Frederick John Horniman chose to ‘represent’ different cultures? Perhaps there is an equivalent to Horniman’s collection in Dakar or Bangkok? Or perhaps not. Perhaps anthropology is a mainly European activity, a product of empire, arising from the need to quickly understand colonised cultures for economic gain. Perhaps John Horniman sought to distance himself from the wounds of empire, but inevitably he is a product of his time.

The Young V&A’s collection focuses on childhood and play, and bears some resemblance in its physical character to certain arrangements in the Horniman. There is a sense of play and experimentation common to both collections. Together they perhaps represent how the notion of play changes as we progress from childhood to adulthood. I want you to create something that responds to one or both of these collections. It can take any form: an object, a piece of writing, a performance. It can be individual or collaborative. It can focus on the museum’s objects or use them as a point of departure. It can focus on the museum’s display systems, or on the language used to describe the artefacts. Responses could take the form of things that can be worn or carried, things that resemble tools, or ritualistic items, gifts, objects that have stories behind them (true or false), archaeological ‘finds’… Finally, in relation to your own practice, think about how the things that you make demonstrate human behaviour: your behaviour. What do they say about you? Does your visit to the Horniman change the way that you see your own artworks as ‘symptoms’ of human behaviour? Does your visit to the Young V&A affect how you see play as a process in your work?

Horniman Museum, 100 London Road, Forest Hill, London SE23 3PQ (11am – 3pm, Wednesday 13 Nov); Room 111 Woo Building, RCA (10am, Thursday 14 Nov); Young V&A, Cambridge Heath Rd, Bethnal Green, London E2 9PA, 11am-3pm, Friday 15 Nov.

For this project, on the Wednesday we’ll visit the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill, southwest London, and on the Friday, the Young V&A in Bethnal Green, East London. In between, on the Thursday, there will be a seminar on themes of anthropology and play.

Getting to the Horniman and the Young V&A

The Horniman is in Forest Hill. Trains from London Bridge Station to Forest Hill run every 20 mins. If you live in east London, the Overground line is best. Follow this link for all options: https://www.horniman.ac.uk/plan-your-visit/. The Young V&A is right next to Bethnal Green tube station, on the central line.

Day 1: Horniman Museum, 11am-3pm. Meet me in the entrance. View and make notes collection. Discussion at 1pm in the room we have booked for the day. Share with the group what interested you.

Day 2: Room 111, Woo Building, 10am. I will present some possible approaches.

Day 3: 11am-3pm Young V&A. Make notes on the collection. Think about overlaps between the V&A and Horniman.

Joseph Kosuth, ‘The Artist as Anthropologist’ (extract)
https://www.vizkult.org/propositions/alineinnature/pdfs/Kosuth-ArtistAsAnthropologist-excerpts.pdf

Hal Foster, ‘The Artist as Ethnographer?’
https://monoskop.org/images/8/87/Foster_Hal_1995_The_Artist_as_Ethnographer.pdf

Percival Everett, ‘The Appropriation of Cultures’ https://faculty.gordonstate.edu/lsanders
senu/Appropriation%20of%20Cultures%20by%20Evertt.pdf

Sean Ashton, review of The Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art
https://mapmagazine.co.uk/martian-museum-of-terrestrial

Art and Anthropology

Death and Memorial: Public Memory and Private Obsession”

This Festus offers an interdisciplinary exploration into the commemoration of death, both in public spaces and in personal experiences. 

Central to this exploration is the screening of the 1971 cult movie Harold and Maude. In the film, Harold and Maude bond through their shared fascination with funerals, though they approach death from contrasting perspectives—Harold’s morbid curiosity contrasts with Maude’s exuberant celebration of life. Moreover, the film provides an allegorical reflection on American society, using death as a metaphor for societal transformations, headonism and disillusionment. This movie serves as a lens through which we will investigate our themes of mortality, grief, and memorialisation, as a mechanism for looking at sculpture.

The module will also feature visits to significant memorials, public sculpture, and the soon to be opened beautiful Central London Coroner’s Court designed by Patrick Lynch in Westminster, London. By engaging with these landmarks, students will contemplate the intersection of art, politics, and memory in public spaces. As part of the three-day workshop, we will dedicate one day to visiting Coventry Cathedral, renowned for its breath taking architecture, and post war investment in societal futures. This site, with its history of destruction and renewal, will serve as a critical point for discussions on how architecture and memorials reflect societal responses to loss and recovery. These visits aim to foster critical reflections on the role that sculpture can play within the rituals and rememberance of loss.

The module is led by Sarah Staton, we will be joined by Patrick Lynch, from Lynch Architects, for a personal tour of the Coroner’s Court, further mystery guests will input into the teaching. 

A detailed timetable and short reading list will be shared with you in early November. 

Death and Memorial

This is an opportunity to collaboratively design and build a temporary pavilion, working closely with the community-based architectural practice 121 Collective. 121 are a collective of architectural designers and makers with a special appreciation for craft, community, and sustainability. 121 come from a shared architectural education at Kingston School of Art; their practice and passion for design and making expands beyond the borders of architecture. 

Through the design and build process we will respond to themes such as inclusion and exclusion, interior and exterior, togetherness and separateness. The rise in global nationalism has compounded and further complicated some of these ideas; how do we now position ourselves, where are we in relation to this person, or that group? The central human need to both belong to a group and be an individual is an enduring paradox that will be explored.

We will carefully consider our use of sustainable materials as well as the structure’s purpose, questioning whether the materials determine the function or vice versa. Could the structure act as a temporary cultural hub and be used for performances, debates, exhibitions, workshops, symposia, meals, etc?

We will look at examples of contemporary and historical contextual references and will consider the relationship between site, community and architecture. We will think about the project as a community-building process that encourages participatory designing and making.

12-14 November: Introduction to the project, meetings with 121 Collective, start design process, including contextual references, building prototypes, ordering materials

10-11 December: Install pavilion in the Hangar

12-13 December: Festus exhibition open, including crits

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion: https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/serpentine-pavilion-2024-by-minsuk-cho-mass-studies

Takeshi Hayatsu: https://www.stanleypickergallery.org/programme/under-construction/

Alex Hartley and Tom James, The Clearing: https://the-clearing.info/about/, https://www.victoria-miro.com/news/529

Rirkrit Tiravanija: https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/13481, https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/rirkrit-tiravanija/

Drop City, 1960-79: https://www.spatialagency.net/database/drop.city

Ant Farm, 1970s: https://www.spatialagency.net/database/ant.farm

Ken Isaacs, 1927-2016: https://walkerart.org/magazine/enter-matrix-interview-ken-isaacs

PAVILION

A Project with Melanie Jackson, Louise Ashcroft, the Museum of the Home, 575 Wandsworth Road (National Trust), The Wellcome Collection, San Mei Gallery, Van Gogh House and Flat Time House. (12th, 13th, 14th of November)

There will be a series of study trips, a seminar, curators talks and Q and A and a making workshop at Flat Time House (materials provided). Following this you will exhibit the work make in relation to the project, in the Hangar at the RCA. There will be a crit for the group on Wednesday 17th December followed by an opening and drinks in the evening.

We will begin by considering artists who activate the relation of the house and the body, the idea of a ‘living house’ whereby art making and viewing is an embodied durational experience. We will look at ideas that feed into conceptions of a house or housing as a living entity, the circulatory systems and networked status of buildings, and the wider relation of body to architecture and the city.

We will look to artists that play with notions of body in its broadest sense whether it be a body of work, human body, social body – and ways in which the word house may be an active verb as well as a noun. We will also discuss a recent piece of writing that asks us to consider historical constructions of home and homeland in this time of global technocracy, and housing emergency. There will be a making workshop at Flat Time House and an opportunity to further develop this work as a response for the exhibition in December.

 A seminar introduction to artists such as Lygia Clarke and Carolee Schneeman, Erwin Wurm, John Latham to Khadambi Asalache who transformed his home into a living artwork. We will bring this right up to the present and look at contemporary artists such as Avril Coroon who incorporate housing precarity and activism in her networked installations and ways in which homes are activated as showing spaces.

Followed by a visit to Museum of the Home, and a special  evening opening of 575 Wandsworth Road for RCA sculpture.

https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/london/575-wandsworth-road/the-home-and-legacy-of-khadambi-asalache

Morning visit Wellcome Collection exhibition Hard Graft: Work, Health and Rights to consider the impact of work on the body when the home is a place of work. In the afternoon

https://wellcomecollection.org/exhibitions/ZpE1ghAAACQAgRSg?gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwsJO4BhDoARIsADDv4vAI0xgoUc6VCtfDB0WbK_FJHl-y-pBxazQZSDjvzjuRnEw8uqgslEcaAtZFEALw_wcB

We will visit San Mei Gallery and Van Gogh House – sister spaces in Brixton that explore the historic house and the gallery as living spaces with series of research projects, interactions and residencies with introductions by the curators. https://www.sanmeigallery.co.uk/exhibitions/sam-ashby-sanctuary  https://vangoghhouse.co.uk/cycles/

Flat Time House - a living house, archive and contemporary art space in Peckham.

Introduction to the curator Gareth Bell and workshop with Artists Louise Ashcroft. (all day)

Louise Ashcroft's workshop 'Home Improvements' is an 'ideathon' in which you will rethink the home (Flat Time House) and its appliances to address societal problems and possibilities that you find compelling.

The vibe is 'Black Mirror https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/70264888 meets Speculative Design https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262019842/speculative-everything/ '. We'll make it into a speculative shopping catalogue. What to bring: yourself, a notebook, a pen, and an idea for a problem relating to how we live now.

This year Louise was in a group show called 'Burning Down the House: Rethinking Family' at Kunstmuseum St.Gallen (Switzerland), exhibiting an album of nursery rhyme songs with lyrics based on responses to a questionnaire of childfree/childless people's views on family. Housing came up a lot - it's fundamental to how we live together; architecture is a psychological space, riddled with ideology, societal values and fantasy. What if a group of artists re-imagined the house and its contents? In 2018 Louise made some radio shows about products; this one playfully analyses the cultural context of The Argos Catalogue https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05z4pb5 (a shopping catalogue full of homewares and appliances). In 2022 Louise built a DIY sperm bank outside her terraced house as a provocation to the fertility industry (long story). How might you augment or alter flat time house to change the lives of its inhabitants. You can be surreal, political, serious, weird, funny, smart, stupid, emotional, logical, practical, or none/all of the above...do it your way and let intuitive possibilities unfold. You will prototype your idea in cardboard and present it to the group; we will make a shopping catalogue of the designs.

Keywords: architecture, body, housing, home, homeland, circulation, systems


Optional inspiration to check out beforehand:

Superflux, Uninvited Guests (film) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ear8W-C96bk

Environment Transformers, Haus-Rucker-Co, 1968 (speculative architecture)  https://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_mind_expander_chair_other_inventions_from_the_far-out

Rirkrit Tiravanija solar ovens at LUMA https://www.luma.org/en/live/watch/do-we-dream-interview-5ec302ef-b864-4ea0-9f0f-66ba54cf43b0.html

PINK de Thierry https://mediakunst.net/public/pink-de-thierry-living-in-art 

Jasleen Kaur (https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/art-and-ideas/on-practice-cooking/ , or https://hollybushgardens.co.uk/files/jasleen-kaur-be-like-teflon.pdf and https://materialmatters.design/Jasleen-Kaur )

Theaster Gates - Dorchester Art and Housing Collaborative (DAHC) https://www.theastergates.com/project-items/dorchester-art-and-housing-collaborative-dahc 

Power Station - a solar punk DIY green new deal https://www.power.film/about

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/147/621569/planetarization-and-heimatlosigkeit-part-1/ Planetarization and Heimatlosigkeit, Part 1Yuk Hui

Melanie Jackson (UK) is an artist and educator who works with modes of non-fiction storytelling through assemblages of sculpture, writing and moving image. They engage with bio-technologies from the perspective of deep history to future science, at shifting scales between the nano/personal/intimate/ to the gargantuan/social/cosmic. There is a focus on work, plant and animal life and the ways they are inculcated into circulatory systems, often calling out tales of excess and the absurd, and of seeking inventive ways of getting by. They work with tactics of representation that treat the gallery as a stage for experimentation: mimicry, documentary, myth fabrication, science, performance, animation, political commentary, music, installation, craft and the cultivation of aesthetic delight.

Melanie also has a collaborative writing practice with Esther Leslie, most recently a new version of their book Deeper in the Pyramid: Share of Throat was re-printed by Wellcome Collection in 2022.

They have held solo exhibitions in the UK at Aspex, Chapter, San Mei Gallery, Block 336, Grand Union, Primary, Banner Repeater, the Drawing Room, Flat Time House, John Hansard Gallery and Matt’s Gallery. She has exhibited in group shows internationally including at the Wellcome Collection, eva+, Ireland, DRF Biennale, (Osaka, Japan), ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, (Karlsruhe, Germany).

At the RCA they work in the MA Sculpture Programme and with PhD students.

Louise Ashcroft's performances, comedy, videos, writing, community projects, drawings, games and sculptures spawn from her optimistic and antagonistic fieldwork in public space; meddling with the bizarre norms of capitalism and reinventing what's possible. ​Speaking fiction to power, Louise's work creates situations and stories which unravel reality and remix primary and secondary research; often deliberately misunderstanding or subverting cultural codes and disrupting systems in order to speculate alternative ways of seeing/being. Louise is also an AL in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London.