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

Festus

This is an opportunity to collaboratively design and build a temporary pavilion, working closely with the community-based architectural practice 121 Collective: https://www.121collective.com/. 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.

Tuesday 21st  October 2pm Meeting with Lead Tutor and Festus group (Week 7)

All day Tuesday 4th, Wednesday 5th, Thursday 6th November Mandatory session days with Lead Tutor

Wednesday 12th November 2-3pm Student led meeting (Week 10)

Wednesday 26th November 2-3pm Student led meeting (Week 12)

Wednesday 3rd December 2-3pm Student led meeting (Week 13)

Tuesday 9th December 10am-5pm Exhibition install in the Hangar (Week 14)

Wednesday 10th December 10-1pm Install - 5pm PV and Xmas Party (Week 14)

Thursday 11th and Friday 12th December Public exhibition days (Week 14)

Tuesday 16th December 10am exhibition de-install (Week 14)

Pavillion

For Festus 2025, Anatomica Criticalia is an interdisciplinary project exploring anatomy, movement, and sculpture. This year we will collaborate with Stars Gym (Battersea) and visit key anatomy collections in London. Students will connect historical artistic and scientific studies of the body with contemporary training modalities, using embodied action to investigate the relationship between art making and physical movement. Both can be understood as forms of non-linguistic communication, linking to ideas of flow states and demonstrating how movement can enhance creativity while bridging body–mind dichotomies.

Anatomy was once a core part of art academy training, grounding artists in form, proportion, tradition, and ideals of beauty and physical perfection. This involved studying Greek sculptures, cadavers and living models. Today, anatomy is informed by posthumanism and AI, and by the sense that our bodies are increasingly mediated by digital technologies.

Stars Gym offers a welcoming, supportive environment focused on physical learning and functionality. No prior gym experience is required – the sessions emphasise participation while respecting your own limits. For this project, no medical or anatomical knowledge is needed, nor any prior background in performance art, anatomical study, or material practice. The focus is on exploration and on challenging your own ideas of practice.

Students will work together to propose an artwork/research response inspired by the project, to be realised in the Hangar in December.

Tuesday 21st October, 2pm – Meeting with Lead Tutor and Festus group (Week 7)

Tuesday 4th, Wednesday 5th, Thursday 6th November:

10:00 – Anatomy Gallery Visits
• Tue: Old Operating Theatre
• Wed: Hunterian Museum
• Thu: Science Museum

13:00–14:00 – Lunch together in Sculpture Studios

14:00–14:30 – Anatomy Lecture / PT Instruction

15:00–16:00 – Stars Gym Workshop (Lifting, Animal Movement, Functional Training, Yoga)

16:30–17:00 – Debrief in Sculpture Studios

Wednesday 12th November, 2–3pm – Student-led meeting (Week 10)

Wednesday 26th November, 2–3pm – Student-led meeting (Week 12)

Wednesday 3rd December, 2–3pm – Student-led meeting (Week 13)

Tuesday 9th December, 10am–5pm – Exhibition install in the Hangar (Week 14)

Wednesday 10th December, 10am–1pm – Install; 5pm – PV and Xmas Party (Week 14)

Thursday 11th & Friday 12th December – Public exhibition days (Week 14)

Tuesday 16th December, 10am – Exhibition de-install (Week 14)

Anatomica Criticalia

The Winter Solstice, or hibernal solstice, occurs when either of the Earth’s poles reaches its maximum tilt away from the sun. It’s the beginning of the astronomical winter.

This is the solstice, the still point 
of the sun, its cusp and midnight, 
the year’s threshold 
and unlocking, where the past
lets go of and becomes the future; 
the place of caught breath, the door
of a vanished house left ajar…

The Circle of Illumination: the imaginary line that separates day from night.

Social Thermoregulator Theory: the desire to seek physical warmth and comfort during the dark days of winter.

This year’s Festus is taking place in the dark days leading towards the Winter Solstice. It’s time of long shadows. Across time and geography, the dark days of winter have been seen as both an ending and a beginning:

Saturnalia (Ancient Rome) celebrated misrule and renewal during the lead-up to the solstice.

Yule (Norse & Germanic tradition) involved burning logs, honouring the rebirth of the sun.

Kōmisai (Japanese Shinto) and other purification rituals used water, fire, and white to cleanse the spirit before the new solar cycle.

Pre-Christian and Neolithic cultures aligned megaliths and chambered tombs (such as Newgrange in Ireland and Stonehenge in England) to capture the first light of the solstice dawn. Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels is a site-specific work that builds on this history.

As the days shorten and darkness gathers, humanity has long turned inward—toward ritual, reflection, and transformation. The period leading to the Winter Solstice, the longest night of the year, has historically marked a sacred turning point: a descent into shadow followed by the slow return of light. Does acknowledging the Solstice still have relevance in contemporary society? How can this be interpreted? How does waking and walking in the dark affect our spatial and temporal understanding of the environments we inhabit? What details and ritualised objects might be part of imaginative thinking that can encompass ideas of misrule, celestial mapping, celestial cycles, and solstice alignments? What is the impact on our bodies and circadian rhythms? How might we perform, and what might we perform with in relation to the darkening of days.  

Towards the Dark is a Festus project hosted by the Standpoint Gallery. Standpoint is a vibrant community of artist practitioners, distinguished by its educational programmes, residency opportunities and exhibitions, including the Mark Tanner Annual Sculpture Prize. We will be working in the ceramic studio and education room with RCA Alumni artist and curator Nat Breitenstein, who will act as our host as well as running workshops during the residency period. There will be an opportunity to work with black clay and white slip provided by Standpoint. While the focus will be on hand building, there will be an opportunity to use the wheel too. The resulting works will be fired at Standpoint. The initial planning meeting in October will provide an opportunity to discuss how these works might be incorporated and form part of the exhibition taking place in December.  Dialogue and exchange of ideas are a crucial part of this Festus Project.

Week 7 - Meeting with Lead Tutor and Festus group

Week 9 - Mandatory session days with Lead Tutor and Guests at Standpoint

Week 14 - Exhibition Install, Viewing, and Deinstallation

Exhibition Install in the Hangar - Tuesday 9th December 10am - 1pm 

Private View and Xmas Party - Tuesday 9th December 5pm onwards

Public Exhibition Days - Thursday 11th and Friday 12th December

Exhibition De-install - Tuesday 16th December 10am

Towards the Dark

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. On Thursday there’ll be a seminar on themes of anthropology and play at the RCA. 

Wednesday 5 Nov 11am – 3pm
Horniman Museum, 100 London Road, Forest Hill, London SE23 3PQ; 

Friday 7 Nov 11am-3pm
Young V&A, Cambridge Heath Rd, Bethnal Green, London E2 9PA

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 was a mainly European activity in Horniman’s day, 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.

While The Young V&A’s collection focuses on childhood, there are overlaps with the Horniman, a sense of play and experimentation common to both. Together they may represent how the notion of play changes from childhood to adulthood. I want you to create something that responds to one or both of these collections. It can take any form: objects, writing, performance, images, or a mix. The outcome will be collaborative: a group artwork exhibited in The Hangar Space at the RCA. It could 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? 


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: RCA Room TBC, 10am. I will present some possible approaches.

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

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.

Joseph Kosuth, ‘The Artist as Anthropologist’ (extract) (1975) https://www.vizkult.org/propositions/alineinnature/pdfs/Kosuth-ArtistAsAnthropologist-excerpts.pdf 

Hal Foster, ‘The Artist as Ethnographer?’ (1995) https://monoskop.org/images/8/87/Foster_Hal_1995_The_Artist_as_Ethnographer.pdf 

Percival Everett, ‘The Appropriation of Cultures’ (1996) https://faculty.gordonstate.edu/lsanders-senu/Appropriation%20of%20Cultures%20by%20Evertt.pdf 

Eunsong Kim The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property (2024) https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rcauk/reader.action?docID=31500485&ppg=109&c=UERG 

Sean Ashton, review of The Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art (2008) https://mapmagazine.co.uk/martian-museum-of-terrestrial

Art and Anthropology

This Festus elective introduces you to the wonderful world of Artist Books, to the London Artist Publishing scene, and to the enjoyment, the production, and dissemination of this most egalitarian of art forms. Over three days we will explore contemporary and historical contexts of this engaging world within worlds; and to do this, we will navigate the city to meet some of the key London based producers and makers of artists' books.

This Festus introduces students to the who, what, where and why of London’s contemporary Artist Book scene.

The group will then work towards a publishing an output for the December Festus exhibition, the topics and content that the group will gravitate towards will be teased out during the 3 workshop sessions.

• RCA Kensington - Special Collections and Letterpress

Workshop dates: 04.11.25, 05.11.25, 06.11.25 at various locations in London

Artist Books

Wild Genders: Body as a Site of Resistance

“These feminists are not ‘becoming women’ in the sense of coming to consciousness, they are unbecoming women in every sense—they undo the category rather than rounding it out, they dress it up and down, take it apart like a car engine and then rebuild it so it is louder and faster. This feminism is about improvisation,customization and innovation.”

— Jack Halberstam, Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal

ARTIVIST Whiskey Chow brings over a decade of experience exploring queer(ing) masculinity, Asian diaspora identity in the West, and wider political urgencies through an intersectional lens. From For Vaginas’ Sake 將陰道獨白到底 (2013) to you must everywhere wander 你必顧盼 (2021), Whiskey will share her creative approach: deeply rooted in lived experience, activist engagement, otherness, transgression, and empowerment.

During this intensive week, participants will engage in exhibition visits, peer discussions, and workshops with pioneering practitioners, researchers, and critics. Together, we’ll explore how artists use the body as a powerful site of resistance - amplifying marginalised voices, expressing activist ambitions, and holding space for vulnerability, freedom, and radical care.

The project asks: How can the body become a site of resistance? How do we respond artistically to the cultural and socio-political contexts we live(d) in? How can queer methodologies shape new possibilities for gender, identity, and representation?

Embodiment, agency, performance, and representation

Marginalisation, misplacement, diasporic experience

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley: The Delusion

https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/danielle-brathwaite-shirley-the-delusion/


Followed by a tailor-made workshop led by Claye Bowler at Queer Britain


Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien: Mémoires des corps

https://www.gasworks.org.uk/exhibitions/marie-claire-messouma-manlanbien-memoires-des-corps/