Royal College of Art offers compensation for work and materials damaged or lost in studio tidy
The conceptual artist Farvash Razavi had planned to use the colour-changing inks she spent two years developing with scientists for an intricate installation at her master’s graduation show. That is, until she found her delicate pieces shattered in a box after her university, the Royal College of Art (RCA), cleared out her studio over the summer.
Razavi’s sculpture, which explored censorship and belonging through the lens of her experience as an Iranian living in Sweden, was just one of many art works irreparably damaged or missing as a result of the RCA’s botched clear-out while the university was closed due to the pandemic. Now, she and other affected students are planning to take the university to court.
“It’s heartbreaking,” she said. “The value of this, the amount of people who’ve been involved, the time I’ve put in, the facilities I’ve been using with labs and printing layers and developing inks, is a minimum £50,000. This is a type of technology that’s still in research, that’s not available. Every piece of it is handmade, there is nothing we can easily remake.”
