Meet Amelia Tan, ACAVA’s Assistant Facilitator
14 October 2022
We’ve been introducing our new Assistant Facilitators over the past few months. Watch this space to learn more about them and their backgrounds.
Our new Assistant Facilitators were recently recruited to support our pool of artist facilitators. The new team members have been working with our Flourish programme this summer and you’ll continue to see them on some of our other programmes too.
First, we introduced Mattie, you can read her Q&A here.
Next, we’re speaking to Amelia Tan. Keep reading to learn about her and her practice.
Introduce yourself!
“I’m an artist born and based in London. I have a degree from Edinburgh College of Art in Intermedia which was within the Fine Art department. I always really loved that the name of the course itself promoted a practice that was between mediums. I also really enjoy cooking and am always looking for more ways for it to seep into my practice.”
What are you looking forward to about working on Flourish: Belong this October half term and what does ‘belong’ mean to you?
“I’m looking forward to getting to know Nicole Morris and her practice as well as hopefully seeing some familiar faces from the Flourish workshops over the summer. It will be interesting to see the different ways everyone interprets the theme. For me, belonging is not only feeling safe and comfortable in an environment but also feeling that you have agency within it.”
Tell us about your practice and an upcoming project
“My practice explores the choreographic and theatrical potential of shared experience, particularly in public space. I’m interested in how coded environments dictate our behaviour, reflecting on ways of finding autonomy while existing in relation to dominant systems that shape the modern world. I was originally in the Sculpture department on my BA and I remember one day consciously realising that I no longer wanted to produce work that permanently takes up physical space. So since then, I have avoided a material based practice, resulting in my work primarily manifesting in performance and video.
I’m currently in development on a project with my collaborator (Amsterdam based Phoebe Pryor) called ‘Eating into Time’ which explores our relationship to time and the ways we measure its passing. We’ve been looking to remove ourselves from capitalist, numerical structures of time measurement, and become deliberately inefficient. In doing so, we have become more in tune with sensory perceptions of time passing, in our bodies and the environments around us. We have some exciting progression happening with that project next year hopefully.”
What would be your dream project?
“When I lived in Edinburgh, I ran a performance company with a group of over 60s and we worked together over about 6 months devising performances. I would love to do something like this again with another group but on an even larger scale and over a longer period of time. ”
