The Woven Project

London. January - July 2024

As part of my MA Curating Contemporary Art course at the Royal College of Art, I, alongside four other researchers, co-founded The Woven Project; a curatorial project that works towards rethinking the widespread power dynamics at play between what we perceive as ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’, both geographically, culturally and personally. The project aimed to investigate ways of challenging these centralised ideologies in London and find new methods that facilitate equal sharing, accessing and making visible bodies of knowledge and resources.

What does centre and periphery mean to you?

The Workshop

As part of the project, we held a space for cultural actors engaging in the arts across the city to join us for a creative workshop and informal round-table discussion that encouraged the sharing of experiences and varying bodies of knowledge, campaigning for decentralised spaces and non-hierarchical methods of connecting that overcome a variety of boundaries within the London arts sector.

'On Saturday, the 25th of May, we gathered fourteen individuals from London's creative sector for a workshop, collaborating with artist Noé Iwai.

In the serene oasis of St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace, we embarked on a collective journey of shared artistry and a real-life enactment of a flat network through spirited discussion, the delicate crafting of masks, and performance.

The workshop provided more than what we could have imagined, expanding our previous ideas surrounding centres and peripheries to encompass new insights through the openness and vulnerability of all present.

Together, by intentionally engaging with the stories, voices, and perspectives of each other, we constructed a tapestry of different experiences and narratives to foster a sense of belonging, mutual respect and togetherness. In doing so, we dismantled hierarchical ideologies within London’s arts ecology, embracing an alternative and holistic creative network.'

The Publication

While the temporal nature of a workshop format

was acknowledged, we felt passionately as a team

about preserving the knowledge, conversation

and relationships generated throughout our project, in order to provide access to a variety of publics existing not only presently, but for years to come. Therefore, our workshop and project as a whole has been documented and archived through a small, loose leaf publication.

The publication includes photography from the workshop, transcribed content from the event’s roundtable discussions, a conversation between the project founders surrounding our personal experiences of the notions of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, and individual, short academic essays from us all. We were also incredibly grateful to have received written commissions, including a poem, from artists Anna Housiada, Vandana Singh and Taey Iohe on their own perspectives on the centre/periphery power dynamic.

Access an online PDF of our publication here

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The Display

Extending the publication, The Woven Project was also presented at the Royal College of Art Exhibition in June 2024. We designed the installation to consist of four curved transparent fabric panels that hang from the ceiling to create a spiral, interrogating the centre and periphery dynamic in a visual and playful way. However, there were multiple entry and exit points to our installation, which combat the hierarchical notions that these terms are so often perceived with. Audiences did not have to walk from the ‘outside’ towards the ‘centre’, but can engage with the spiral in a multiplicity of ways, encouraged also by the transparency of the fabric. Audiences were invited to sit within the installation and engage with our publication, as well as some of the materials used in our workshop.