Howdy!

Hello everyone! My name is Alexia and i’m a new intern here at CIDA. I’m getting my MA in Creative Cities as King’s – a programme that combines not just courses on the Creative and Cultural Industries but also cultural policy, geography, and urban development. I came here from America after studying glassmaking and photography to learn how to provide more creative opportunities to excluded and marginalised people and have always wanted to bring more installation and experience-based art into smaller cities and rural areas.

I’m so happy to be interning for CIDA because their organisation essentially encompasses my reason for coming to England. As an artist, much of my work also seeks to do the same. Through art and creativity, I want to help others overcome the difficulties of imagining other people and allow my audience to experience thought outside of themselves. Personally, I think that art isn’t just about aesthetics or objects- it’s about experiences and communicating as society in a new way. And I want more let more people have their voices heard. 

The weekend before I started this internship I was fortunate enough to visit the Venice Biennale and was thoroughly overwhelmed and inspired. For those of you that don’t know, many countries at the Biennale have their own pavilions to showcase the best art being produced from their nation- perhaps it’s easier to think about as the art Olympics? Anyway, what I saw at the Japanese pavilion I will never forget. It was almost meta- in a way; it did everything I want to do while examining art and what it can do in the bigger narrative of ‘how can art realistically bring people together?’ ‘How can it contribute after the tsunami?’

The exhibiting artist, KokiTanaka, responded to these questions by examining collaboration, shared experiences in microcommunities, creation and problem solving. His work was so simple and moving: all he did was ask people to come together to do something together, make something together, or experience something together. The art itself was the event, and the videos playing all around the pavilion were artefacts. 

[from Koki Tanaka's piece at the Biennale x]

For example, he had nine different people collaborate on the haircut of one woman, each taking their turn on her hair and getting everyone’s opinion. Similarly, a group of people went on an urban expedition with flashlights, another group collaborated on pottery, on poetry, on a piano piece. A group of people took a nap together with all of their heads facing eachother to try to dream collectively, and then constructed the narrative of a story when they woke up together. I thought the most poetic was when each person brought their favourite tea and put it all in one teapot and drank from it, sharing and uniting bits of the world in a single, communal act.

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You can learn more about the project here