From hidden ribbons and feminist visions of flight to architectural heritage through the eye of the algorithm

A symposium, taking place at the RCA’s Battersea campus from 25-27 February, offers the opportunity to discover recent insights and unique approaches from the RCA student research community. The event includes thematic presentations of papers, workshops, performances, and roundtables, as well as keynotes from artist, educator and researcher Barby Asante and artist, writer, and researcher Ashkan Sepahvand.

While the RCA Research Biennale 2025 exhibition is a chance to see artworks and designs by practice-based RCA research students, the symposium provides the opportunity to hear presentations of academic papers, talks and discussions that bring the ideas behind students’ research to life. It enables a deep dive into original approaches to many pressing topics, as well as space to ask questions and join in discussions creating new knowledge in specialist fields. The event will showcase what art and design research methods and practice can bring to historic research as well as contemporary debates in art and design.

Dámaso Randulfe

Academic papers are being presented in thematic groupings. These cover diverse areas of art and design practice and theory and include: Spatial Justice & Climate Politics; Digital Experiments and AI Technologies; Body, Care & Fictions; Extractivism and Geologies; Textile Histories and Feminist Practices; and Histories of Networks and Movements.

From the School of Architecture, London Arts and Humanities Partnership (LAHP)-Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) scholarship funded Dámaso Randulfe presents a bookwork in progress, exploring the afterlives of the Spanish military dictatorship (1939–1975). In the Garden There Are Images of You was produced during fieldwork in Almería, a region in the arid southeast of the Iberian Peninsula which hosts the world’s largest concentration of greenhouses and has legacies of colonial enterprises, radioactive contaminations, and fascist massacres.

From uncovering the past to considering the future, architect and School of Architecture PhD candidate, Małgorzata Starzyńska-Grześ is presenting a paper drawn from her research into the transdisciplinary advancement of AI and machine learning applications in 3D space recognition. She will showcase an experimental project applying machine learning to point cloud analysis of Christ Church Spitalfields in London and Our Lady Help of Christians Church in Birmingham. This underscores the potential and limitations of digital documentation in conveying architectural experience and heritage buildings through ‘the eye of the algorithm’.

Scan of Our Lady Help of Christians, Małgorzata Starzyńska-Grześ

Other researchers considering new view points include artist and LAHP-AHRC studentship supported researcher Varvara Keidan Shavrova, who is presenting a paper exploring flight from a feminist perspective. Her paper considers what a subjectively emancipatory, politically deterritorialised mode of flight might look like when reimagined and reclaimed through haptic technologies and collaborative feminist practices of textiles and fibre-based art.

Sculpture by Varvara Keidan Shavrova at RCA Research Biennale 2025 exhibition

Some research students at the RCA make the most of close links with nearby institutions, such as the Victoria and Albert Museum. AHRC and Taiwan Ministry of Education funded PhD student Laurence Wen-Yu Li is presenting a paper exploring how ribbons were used to demarcate boundaries between women’s underclothes and outerwear in late Qing (1860-1911) China. This forms part of her wider cultural study with the History of Design programme and the Victoria and Albert Museum, into ribbons on late Qing Chinese women’s clothing. Alongside conventional sources – like vernacular novels, pictorial newspapers, photographs, and existing garments – Laurence utilises erotic paintings, prints, and sculptures to understand how undergarments looked on a person’s body, arguing that these often overlooked sources are invaluable to the study of Chinese undergarments, which are rarely depicted in more ‘respectable’ forms like literary paintings.

文玉大襟衫定裝2024, Laurence Wen-Yu Li

Hannah Auerbach George, a LAHP-funded Collaborative Doctoral Award PhD student at the Material Science Research Centre and the Victoria and Albert Museum, is researching lost material technologies held within archive collections. Her paper argues for the importance of historical technologies in informing current material discourses on sustainability. Through fibre analysis and documentary evidence she uncovers examples of these fibres, re-establishing their place in historical records and applying the material knowledge gained to contemporary textile development.

Other previously overlooked areas attended to by RCA researchers include specific user groups. The practice-based research of MRes RCA graduate and School of Design PhD candidate Orla Fahey is focused on the design of pedestrian road safety in London. It considers why pedestrians have been marginalised in road safety data and proposes ways that design methodologies can be used to improve knowledge sharing across stakeholder groups to resolve conflicting agendas and competing interests to benefit pedestrians.

itinerant space journal landing page

Throughout the symposium, roundtables offer deeper dives into the papers presented and performances provide insights into research through alternative presentation formats. There are also several interactive workshops, where participants can experience and contribute to elements of research students work. One is run by two School of Communication students, Nick Bell and Kam Rehal, the current editors of itinerant space – the journal of art, design and communication research practice based in the School of Communication for student research-in-progress. The workshop will share insights and experiences from their work on issue 2 of the journal, which launched in the summer of 2024, and provide an opportunity for research students to discuss itinerant space as a student-run platform, with discussion of the unique peer review process which has been developed for the journal. The workshop will also launch the call for submissions for issue 3 of the journal, which will be published in the summer of 2025.