World Expo 2025 with Het Nieuw Institute, Osaka

Part of the BLOODY BEAUTIFUL programme by affect lab.

Het Nieuw Institute had invited us to present Bloody Beautiful at the Dutch Pavilion for the World Expo in Osaka. HNI were curating an exciting live magazine format around the theme of COMMON GROUND, an urgent call right now for the world. We were very honoured to be commissioned as one of 7 Cultural Specials that were headlining this Cultural Programme.

The World Expo is quite a spectacle. It runs from 13th April - 13th October and during this time period the expected visitor count for is 28 million people (!!!). At our stand we presented a remixed video artwork, revisiting our first “Bleeding into the Metaverse” collaboration with Sputniko! (2023). We were happy to share this space alongside Introdans, Arne Hendriks, HOH Architecten, Tomoko Mukaiyama, Benjamin Herman and FieldRecords. It was a wild experience to have a platform with such a big outreach and we were overwhelmed by how busy it was! Both professionals, families and schools visited and everyone wanted a Bloody Beautiful flyer. 

A highlight was 17 May where we participated in a talkshow at the Pavillion with artists and designers from the Netherlands and Japan. In the panel with us was Adrian Luteijn from Introdance, who also made a spectacular and moving performance shown at the expo. We together reflected how inclusion and equity plays out in cultural work, the needs of different bodies and intercultural knowledge exchange. 

Arigato arimas to Het Nieuw Institute for the invitation, to Sputniko for the continuous collaboration and to everyone who came by.