Studio Sundown: Recontextualising the collection
Studio Sundown is a new strand of our programme, a series of short, informal workshops that are open to the whole RCA community (staff, students and graduates) as well as young people from schools and colleges across London. The purpose is to provide further opportunities for RCA students to develop and lead workshops based around their practice, and create contexts in which people at different stages of their creative education can meet, share ideas and work together.
Students were invited to propose a workshop based around a question within their practice. It didn’t need to encapsulate everything their work is about – it just had to be something they were thinking about currently, and would like to actively explore with others. Their question might tackle a big, philosophical theme; it might be about a particular material; it might test a new process; it might explore an idea that they were finding frustrating or exciting or new. Studio Sundown offered a playful and experimental environment in which to explore that question by making, doing, collaborating and discussing.
Workshops took place on Monday evenings, and lasted two-to-three hours, giving participants enough time to get into the activities but without the pressures associated with a longer time commitment.
This session was a collaboration by three students, Laura Copsey, Jennifer Martin and Philip Crewe, who are all interested in the connections between memory, history and truth, particularly in relation to museums. Their activities explore how history might take on a fictional dimension, be re-written, distorted, manipulated or reinterpreted. They questioned whether we can trust our cultural institutions to ethically categorise and display artefacts and works of art.
Laura, Jennifer and Philip took on the role of museum curators, with participants becoming experts charged with contextualising some mysterious artefacts. The experts created stories and explanations, which were then validated or disrupted with the introduction of further evidence. Finally, a museum display was created, and each pair of experts presented their findings to the rest of the group.