‘Expand Your Reality’ with the Immersive Art Installation ‘29Rooms’ (Q&A)
A conversation with Olivia-Jene Fagon of Refinery29 as they prepare their five city tour
The immersive art pop-up 29Rooms by Refinery29 has been taking cities by storm since 2015. It started as a pop-up in NYC and expanded to Los Angeles in 2017, and has attracted more than 100,000 visitors from around the world since its inception. And this summer, they plan to take the current incarnation of the exhibit, Expand Your Reality, on the road — including its first international showing — in partnership with IMG. Expect the Instagram-friendly exhibit to show up in Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, Toronto, and Washington, DC.
We spoke to Olivia-Jene Fagon, Associate Creative Director, Experiential at Refinery29 over email to learn more about the history of the event, their partnerships with brands, their collaborations with artists, and more.
No Proscenium: Can you tell us a little about yourself, your background, and Refinery29?
Olivia-Jene Fagon (OJF): I was born and raised in Washington, DC, and came to New York after studying art history and media at Brown. I fell in love with art at an early age and started my career at The Smithsonian, The Phillips Collection, and Artsy. I cut my marketing teeth doing brand strategy at Imprint Projects and today I’m a Creative Director of Events at Refinery29, the leading media and entertainment company for young women. From our live events and editorial to our original video content, our mission is to be a catalyst for women to see, feel, and claim their power.
NP: What, in a nutshell, is 29Rooms about? Can you tell us more about this year’s theme “Expand Your Reality”?
OJF: Officially, 29Rooms is Refinery29’s festival of cause, culture and creativity. It’s an event that comes to life through traveling tours, venue takeovers and spaces transformed by art and design. At each 29Rooms, we work with collaborators across the arts, activism, and culture to create a tasting menu of twenty nine installations, performances, and workshops.This year’s tour theme, “Expand Your Reality,” which we launched last September in New York, is all about unlocking our audience’s imagination, provoking thought, and daring them to dream bigger. Internally, Expand Your Reality was also built to expand our audience’s perception of what 29Rooms is and could be. We wanted to create more opportunities for interactivity and theatrics on-site so we introduced hands-on art workshops, a reimagined nightclub, phoneless experiences and opportunities for guests to engage directly and disarmingly with each-other.
NP: Where did 29Rooms come from? What was the original inspiration?
OJF: We launched 29Rooms in 2015 as a bit of an experiment to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Refinery29. In its inception it was our way of bringing our digital brand to life for our audience physically and disrupting the exclusivity of New York Fashion Week with one of the few events that was inclusive and free. It was also an opportunity to celebrate all of the creative voices, artists, nonprofits and brands that resonate most with our audience. We partnered with visionaries like Petra Collins, Shantell Martin, and Solange Knowles to create 29 distinct artistic experiences, all housed within one Brooklyn warehouse.
NP: How has 29Rooms changed over the years?
OJF: Every year we launch 29Rooms with a new tour, a new theme and a new roster of artists, creatives, brands and non-profits that we build unique experiences with. Change is inherent in how we decide what conversations and topics across culture, arts and politics to cover, which we do collaboratively with Refinery29 content leads who have their fingers on the pulse of our audience. At 29Rooms, whether we are advocating for women’s political agency with The Women’s March or showcasing new narrative VR with Hyphen Labs, the event stays relevant and responsive to what’s resonating with people right now and what we’re hoping will inspire them next.
After 5 years of bringing 29Rooms to life, the team has been able to reflect on each event and evolve the experience based on feedback directly from our audience. With “Expand Your Reality” we wanted to reinvent our guests’ experience with rooms that invited introspection like writing a letter to your inner child, hands-on art making, live dance performances and phone-free experiences, challenging our guests to open up and engage with themselves and strangers in new ways.
Touring has also had a positive impact on the event, allowing us to elevate unique talent and voices across the country. 29Rooms started as a once-a-year pop-up in NYC and in 2018 we took the event on the road for the first time, bringing the Turn It Into Art tour to four cities, which invited us to establish what our tour model could be. What did it mean for 29Rooms to show up in new markets and for our creative to travel for over a year? Now with the “Expand Your Reality” tour we are bringing a selection of tourable highlights from last year with us and also making sure we reflect the culture and community of each city by introducing new rooms created with local artists and performers specific to each market.
The event has changed so much in the past five years but much of the original formula is there.
NP: What kinds of things can the participants do while inside the immersive playground and how do these tie back to the theme?
For us, “Expand Your Reality” takes shape in so many ways. This summer we’re bringing 29Rooms to five new cities, including our first ever international location providing us with the opportunity to introduce our audience to new artists, creatives, ideas and other guests that they might not typically have access to. Similarly, this will be, for many of our guests who follow and love Refinery29 online, their first time to see and feel our brand in real life with rooms that are dedicated to R29 initiatives like Unbothered, our platform for black millennial women, and Shatterbox, Refinery29’s ongoing film initiative to support female directors in Hollywood.
At its heart, “Expand Your Reality” will invite guests to create the experience themselves by engaging with one another. They’ll be challenged to open up in rooms like 29Questions, a led question and answer experience between two strangers or Blind Date With Destiny, an anonymous palm reading room. Spaces like our phoneless dance party curated with music and performances for each tour stop and our hands-on art making room are both celebratory spaces for guests to express and release through movement and art making.
We also want to be attentive to our audience’s need for self-care with more safe and grounding spaces that feel nurturing. In our recreated teenage bedroom with artist Uzumaki Cepeda or psychic storefront with The HoodWitch, guests can step away from their usual surroundings, be present and look inward to reconnect with themselves.
NP: How are you designing around audience agency, consent, and safety?
OJF: It’s always our mission to put the audience first at 29Rooms and we build the event to be a safe space overall for our guests. We consider their safety and consent both in how we holistically host and treat them in our venue (from how we train and ask our staff to welcome them to ensuring spaces are ADA accessible) as well as using our individual room creative to elevate underrepresented voices (creating our own LGBTQIA+ Pride float in collaboration with artist Marina Fini at 29Rooms San Francisco and collaborating on a commemorative alter to Chicago gun violence with artist Shani Crowe at 29Rooms Chicago).
And we make sure there’s consistency across both. Last year one of our rooms was a reimagined gender-neutral public bathroom, created in collaboration with Jill Soloway with illustrations from Xavier Schipani. The values of that room needs to be consistent throughout the venue, so we have gender neutral bathrooms available at the venue and ensure to communicate that with our guests through signage.
The success of “Expand Your Reality” has also been a testament to how our guests recognize and build that safe space with us. A lot of our rooms are designed to push our guests out of their comfort zone, from having your palm read anonymously or dancing without your phone in a room of strangers, and we were blown away by how willing and ready our audience was to engage in these.
NP: Past editions of 29Rooms have been quite popular and the experience usually sells out. Why do you think people find immersive art so compelling?
OJF: Immersive art has been a destination for decades and we are definitely trafficking in that legacy, but 29Rooms sits in its own space and we’re mindful of that. It’s exciting right now because there’s so much hunger in people to show up in person and be moved by not just art but style, music, activism and by collective experiences, especially when it’s also inspiring in its scale and when it’s totally transportive.
And art at that scale can feel inherently more inviting, especially for those who might not feel welcome or comfortable in more traditional art spaces.There’s accessibility to a space that’s aim is to impact you in an all encompassing way like Turrell or one that’s asking directly for you to get involved like Urs Fischer’s work or follow along on a story like Sleep No More. Not every experience at 29Rooms is immersive, nor tries to be, but we do aim to make every experience audience-centered and that means rooms that are intuitive to anybody, spaces that invite participation, spaces that are inspired by topics or built with collaborators we know our guests care about.
For a lot of the artists we work with, it’s often their first time creating something experiential and I think that is one of the major differentiators of the event and reasons people love 29Rooms. When you get the chance to step into a 360 video installation created by Lena Waithe, listen to Cleo Wade’s voice guiding you through a meditation in a womb-inspired installation or explore a surreal dreamscape straight from the mind of Kali Uchis, you’re getting an immediacy and something intimate with theses creatives that’s unique and immersive.
NP: How are the partner brands incorporated into the 29Rooms experience?
OJF: We’re intentional with how our brand partners are integrated at 29Rooms. We collaborate directly with brands to bring their own dedicated rooms to life, which our in-house creative, design and production team co-creates with them. We want our branded rooms to enhance the design and atmosphere of the event, so our creative approach is to build their experiences FOR the audience versus marketing to them. 29Rooms is not an event where guests will see big logos plastered everywhere. Instead, we give our brands a heartbeat at 29Rooms and apply the same creative and design principles to their spaces that we do across the event to ensure that they show up in a way that’s artful, authentic and meaningful.
NP: Who is the ideal audience member for this experience?
OJF: Truthfully what’s great is that 29Rooms has a very diverse audience, from people who are experience-lovers and have a constant rotation of events they attend with friends, people who are superfans of the Refinery29 brand and those who are really invested in the now and next in arts and culture. Ultimately 29Rooms is a place to connect, grow, and explore yours and others creativity so it’s for anyone who is culturally curious and open to that.
NP: What do you hope participants take away from attending the experience?
OJF: We want to create a space for guests to feel more in touch with themselves through newness and surprise. When is the last time you picked up a paint brush, repeated an affirmation out loud, really thought about your teenage bedroom or actually connected with a stranger? We hope we unlock a sense of fun and possibility in guests so that they leave feeling open, hungry for what’s next in their life, and inspired to take action whether that’s physically, creatively, socially or politically.
Learn more about 29Rooms.
Tickets for each of the five cities are available now, starting at $30.
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