Isolation 2020 is a show of individual research in collaboration with the San Mei Gallery, London, and the creation of a digital publication launched at the RCA Research Biennale. It's the result of four months of interdisciplinary research collaboration between 24 students from the MRes Architecture and MRes Fine Arts and Humanities Pathways.

Watch now: Isolation 2020 Introduction Video

About Building Research

A ‘building’ is a thing made up of parts. It is a seemingly whole or individual element, but on closer inspection is networked, connected, and made up of materials, histories, ideas, embodiments, disciplines, sounds, views, feelings, structures, thresholds. But building is also a verb, a process, quite often a collaborative one, working between and among different skills, knowledges, perspectives and experiences. The Schools of Architecture and Fine Art and Humanities have combined for the first part of the MRes to work together, under the theme of ‘Building Research’. The aim is to explore the role of group working, co-making and collaboration when configuring research ideas and making processes across the two disciplines. The project examines the points at which the influence, practices, concepts or professional skills of others are vital to the development of individual research. What does, or could, ideas of ‘the group’ offer you as a fine artist, a writer or as an architect as you begin building your research design? Participants were divided into the four groups Foundations, Thresholds, Parts and Views to constitute a virtual building. They were then asked to collude, write and make within their groups in response to manifesto writing workshops, sculptural making events, provocations and invitations by a range of architects, artists, writers and performers including: Mira Mattar, Honor Gavin, Ibiye Camp, Faisal Abdu’Allah, Livia Qing Wang, Annie Cattrell and Katie Pratt. 

A Fantastical Archeology
(Digital Publication)

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“As a cohort of Architecture and Fine Arts & Humanities research students, we were met with the brief to collectively erect a building, consisting of collaborative creative and critical exercises.

Regarding the finished construct, we found that the landscape we shared over the past four months has had an immense impact on the building. As the covid-19 pandemic forced us to retreat into digital spaces, the university had entered the intimacy of our homes. We sat in our lonely bedrooms which stretched out through the time zones, as we met in a shared classroom built according to the architecture of communication software.

Both time and space have become multiple and new rules entered our collective working as we simultaneously tried to contest, extend, re-invent, tear down and reshape the parameters of this strange and fantastical space.

We found it to be an uneven archeological site that invites us to revisit it over and over again, to explore, uncover, get lost and make a home. It is made of the places we lost, the places we inhabit, and the place in which we met.”

The creative output of the cohort was exhibited on 23-24 February in an 'isolated' Works-in-Progress Show at the gallery.

Installation Views

Photography credit: Ben Deakin

Events

ISOLATION 2020 - A Fantastical Gathering

(Launch event as part of the RCA Research Biennale)

1 March 2021, 11am - 1pm

“As our work and interaction with each other took place within a virtual environment, we started to think about the alternative world we were living in and its hidden representation. We used analogies, similarities and fiction, as well as reality-capturing software, to play with the space inhabited between that which is considered real or virtual. We investigated the cosmology of a work of art framed in a collaborative and interdisciplinary habitat.” 

The MRes Students from The School of Architecture and the School of Arts and Humanities warmly welcome you to a discussion with Forensic Architecture researcher Ariel Cain and writer Honor Gavin.

This event launches ISOLATION 2020 - The Places We Lost, The Places We Inhabit, the Place in Which We Met: A Fantastical Archeology a joint digital publication and a show in collaboration with San Mei Gallery , London. As part of the launch we will be joined by San Mei Gallery Associate Curator, Ludovica Penelope Bulciolu.

ISOLATION 2020 forms a discussion around the central, collaborative project for the MRes Programme at the RCA that this year asks how to build research in isolated times -- a collaborative metaphor of building as both verb and noun, and its component descriptors of Foundations, Thresholds, Parts and Views.

Hosted by the students the discussion will explore collaboration, interdisciplinary working, online architectures and nomadic conversations.