Cultural programming at Tokyo 2020: the impossible Olympic festival city?

IOC website screenshot | Olympic Agora (Aug 2021) The Tokyo 2020 Games will be remembered as the Games without a live audience. They will be talked about as the ‘Covid Games’ that were forced to exclude spectators and collective gatherings. The sporting competition field was protected to the best of the organisers’ ability — and …

Giant inflatables and flying dancers. Olympic art has always turned heads.

In the days before the Tokyo 2020 opening ceremony, people were treated to the sight of a giant head floating over the city. Entitled Masayume, this oversized balloon installation by Japanese artist collective Me, was part of the Tokyo Tokyo Festival], as an arts response to the Olympic Games.  Art has long accompanied the arrival …

‘Let Space Speak’ | Tokyo 2020 Opening Ceremony

This Olympic Opening Ceremony offers poignant images of what is ‘not’ there One of the things that struck me the most during Japan’s 2016 Forum of Sport & Culture was a talk by a Japanese living national treasure on the importance of empty space – and nothingness – in Japanese culture. The opening ceremony of Tokyo 2020 has had …

London 2012 Cultural Olympiad Evaluation

Photo: Beatriz Garcia during Piccadilly Circus Circus, part of the London 2012 Festival In November 2011, the major stakeholders in the Cultural Olympiad and London 2012 Festival commissioned Dr Beatriz Garcia and her team at the  Institute of Cultural Capital (ICC) to produce an assessment of the multiple impacts of hosting the Cultural Olympiad. The final …

When the Games can’t go on

The Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games have been postponed. It is only the fourth time this happens in 124 years, the only three previous occasions being due to World War I and World War II. The global virus pandemic of 2020 is forcing a halt on all international sport and cultural mega-events and this …

Paris 2024 Cultural Olympiad

Beatriz Garcia is in Paris responding to a day workshop on the Paris 2024 Cultural Olympiad. She will be talking to key local stakeholders representing la Ville de Paris and the rapidly developing and newly redefined boroughs (établissements public territoriales) surrounding the Olympic Park site in Seine Saint Denis. They are : Plaine Comune, Est …

Rio 2016 Legacy

Published in collaboration with Culture @ the Olympics, Aberje and the University of São Paulo Dr Beatriz Garcia and her collaborators at the University of Sâo Paulo and Aberje are in Rio this week presenting the results of our one year UK-Brazil research collaboration to explore the immediate legacy of hosting the Rio 2016 Games on the …

Tokyo 2020 Cultural Olympiad

Youth, heritage, empowerment and nationwide celebration Article originally published by Beatriz Garcia via Net TAM in 2018 (In English | In Japanese) The Cultural Olympiad has been an essential component of every edition of the Olympic Games since 1912. Despite its long history, the Olympic cultural programme is one of the least well known dimensions of the …