Ritualistic performances, lace-making workshops and architectural night walks: Experience the RCA around London this June

Naiyi Wang is a PhD History of Design researcher and the curator behind the Care Pavilion. Alongside a team of activists, scholars, healers and cultural practitioners, Naiyi considers what care means through time and in our current state of global crisis via a series of rituals within their unique installation space. Naiyi’s team begins from an understanding of the Latin word for ‘curating’, curare meaning ‘to care’ and ‘to cure’. From there, the pavilion builds out a radical understanding of care’s architectural, cultural and political forms across ages.

The Inner Peace Pavilion by our MA Textiles student Amelia Peng brings together composers from the Royal College of Music, Italian textile weavers and the Specialist Modelling Group from architecture firm Foster+Partners to explore mental health. Visitors to the pavilion will have an interactive experience combining smart textiles and musical performance that engages them through their own emotional responses, which direct both the visual and sound effects of the responsive installation.

Finally, RCA student design innovations will be on show as part of the EUREKA exhibition – ‘a global gathering of the world's most ambitious and imaginative designers, curators and design institutes.’ Our students will show projects from RCA Grand Challenge 2022/23 in partnership with Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI). The projects were developed with UK coastal communities to investigate the ways that design can leverage citizen science-led practices to increase the health and productivity of the world’s oceans.

‘What if the night is actually the lifeworld that holds the keys to our everyday experience?’ ask the organisers of Cities of the Night, part of the London Festival of Architecture from the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and the RCA. Cities of the Night is curated by Urban Night Practice, an artistic research project at the RCA led by Reader in Urban Aesthetics, Rut Blees Luxemburg. The exhibition brings together artists exploring the nighttime through large-scale photography and video archive at RIBA from 1 to 30 June.

Alongside the exhibition, on 22 June a RIBA Late will take the participants into the night with a commissioned DJ set by multidisciplinary artist and Associate Lecture in our MA Photography, Chooc Ly Tan. Following this, a collective night walk led by artist Alisa Oleva and supported by the RCA will invite visitors to immerse themselves in the political and poetic potentials of the night in the areas surrounding RIBA.

The final RCA event of the festival accompanies Highway Mindway, a collaborative exhibition between the RCA and Prague’s Academy of Arts. Instant Highway on 24 June will see Tutors Adam Knight and Dr Wiebke Leister of our Graduate Diploma in Art & Design explore the celebrated Brutalist architecture of the Czech Embassy.

Returning to our RCA Kensington neighbourhood, the Great Exhibition Road Festival will celebrate the awe that science and the arts can bring through public engagement.

Two of our PhD students will show their research to new audiences at the festival. Mary Adeturinmo (MRes Healthcare & Design) and Melanie King (PhD Arts & Humanities) are leading events across the weekend of the 17–18 June. Photographing the Invisible on 17 June from Melanie King at the Goethe Institute is an exploration of the photographic technology that allows us to capture sound and heat waves. Design for Sickle Cell on both 17 and 18 June from Mary Adeturinmo is a workshop for families and young adults that will advance understanding of the sickle cell through interactive play.

Further RCA contributions will include garland-making workshops from RCA Drawing at the Royal Geographical Society, a workshop on lace-making from our MA/MSc Global Innovation Design graduate Zhaodi Feng, and an opportunity to play with our MA Design Products graduate, Britton Kroessler’s Wiggel toy in the Family Playzone. Finally, our students will be assisting engineers from Imperial College with a special project involving tiger worms and toilets.