is an extensive transdisciplinary theory programme that addresses students and faculty at all departments of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie Amsterdam. It regularly opens up to broader audiences. Studium Generale wants to show how art and design are linked with other domains (from the personal to the political, from the vernacular to the academic), how our ‘now’ is linked with past and future, our ‘here’ with ‘elsewhere’. This portal website informs about recent activities and refers to archived material from previous editions.
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As artists, writers, and thinkers, we are often encouraged to consider the human body as a type of material: as an object that can be freely regarded, interpreted, adapted, and critiqued. In this capacity, it is easy to overlook the ethical stakes involved with public presentations of the human body. What is more, bodies that are presented as public objects (and therefore as accessible and available objects) are often also bodies that occupy precarious social positions. As artists, writers, and thinkers, then, we have a responsibility towards the bodies we portray, whether that body is our own or someone else's. In this lecture, Dr. Nadia de Vries will share critical insights from her own research on the presentation and circulation of vulnerable bodies, and offer practical considerations for those interested in, or currently working with the human body as an aesthetic material.
Dr. Nadia de Vries (1991) is a poet and essayist. She is the author of the critical memoir Kleinzeer (Uitgeverij Pluim, 2019; in Dutch) and the poetry collections Dark Hour (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018) and I Failed to Swoon (2021). In 2020, she defended her PhD dissertation titled Digital Corpses: Creation, Appropriation, and Reappropriation, about the online representation of dead and dying human bodies, at the University of Amsterdam. -
In this writing workshop we’ll do reading and writing exercises using (excerpts of) texts from Carlo Ginzburg and Silvia Federici on witchcraft, rural life, micro-history, art, and Plant Horror essays on how the vegetal overtakes the human in every un/thinkable scenario. We’ll use their texts to look at interspecies bodies or not-necessarily-human bodies, plant-bodies, vegetal bodies - who greatly outnumber the human/esque - allowing y/ourselves to become reciprocally and ritually eaten by the vegetal. Our textbook/s are y/our dictionaries of choice! From etymological pathfinding to il/logistical laughter.
Carlo Ginzburg paraphrases Italian micro historian Giovanni Levi: “The purchase of a seemingly simple loaf of bread, in fact, connects us to the entirety of the world's grain markets.” What did the loaf experience before it entered into y/our mouths? Eating the loaf we may experience an act of transmutation: where the bread-body becomes human-flesh body, the granular loaf turns cellular flesh, or more radically: the life of the loaf joins the life of the eater.
ecopoetics: oikos, house + poiein, create
horse: heroin
spirit: guts
soul: embodiment
PS: the form of address here used: “y/our”, means to indicate potential interspecies collective bodies, populations as bodies, and any body of choice, of which some bodies perhaps appear to not speak, that doesn’t necessarily imply consent to y/our bodyidentity.
October 28; November 11, 25; December 9; January 13, February 3, 17; March 10, 17:00-18:30, Fedlev Auditorium
In principle, participation in a group concerns the entire series.
Sign in here: https://outlook.office365.com/owa/calendar/StudiumGenerale1@grac.onmicrosoft.com/bookings/
Charlotte Rooijackers writes on pharmakopoetics: intoxication, healing, states of un/consciousness, poisoned positionings, invocations, essayistic elixirs. From the perspective of the pharmakon any material or substance can be poisonous or healing depending on their dosage. S/he identifies as mixed, halfblooded, indo, limbo, postcolonial Dutch, Indo-European, non-binary, feminist, humanesque, non-humanly populated, bodies, macrobiotic, microbiomic, practising vegetation – out of order to become more alive-and-dead and less product. -
Taka Taka will present a character construction workshop with tools that they have developed from their camp - dragtivist practice, the result of which will be a public presentation. Taka Taka welcomes students from all departments, genders and sexualities.
Drag identity is formed by empowerment and playing with expectations, appropriating characteristics of known symbols and presenting a dramatic sense of the ideal self. Taka Taka will lay down archetypes as a resource for character construction in order to play with expectations and identity. The aim of the workshop is to reveal the reality of the act of dressing/undressing as an undeniable personal and social engagement and understanding one's impact, the realities of character and their production from fingernail till toenail.Drag Queens have historically played an important role in HIV activism in many communities, as well as sharing valuable knowledge about STIs, drug harm reduction, sex work and working your sex. They challenge gender norms, push boundaries around sexuality and redefine the heteronormative reality. Taka Taka personally experiences drag to be a transcending form of communication of a self-absorbed spectacle. Drag needs entertainment in order to give voice for its community in the public domain. It could be argued that Drag stands as an activist proposition for under-represented groups and their intersections. Doing Drag is interrelated with the statement of its sociopolitical position; thus the context where drag is performed defines its position.
For this workshop we will use tools from drag to define our performance characters and reflect on the following question: How can we relate to the art context in order to channel and experience the power and responsibility of getting attention through our altered public image? Results from last year’s workshop Relating (to) Colour can be seen here: come-and.hotglue.me
October 28; November 11, 25; December 9; January 13, February 13, 17; March 10, 17:00-18:30, Rietveld's Gym
In principle, participation in a group concerns the entire series.
Sign in here: https://outlook.office365.com/owa/calendar/StudiumGenerale1@grac.onmicrosoft.com/bookings/
Panagiotis Panagiotakopoulos (36, GR), a.k.a Taka Taka, was trained as a professional make-up artist, studied Fine Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie followed by the MA ArtEZ at the Dutch Art Institute (DAI). Taka Taka identifies as a professional dragtivist and edu-curator who produces performances as art director for the Amsterdam cruise club Church. Taka Taka sees drag as an amplified voice, whose purpose is to communicate, problematize and propose methods according to local (Amsterdam) conditions. Taka Taka is the godmother of the House of Hopelezz, sister for others, mother of the drag king House of Løstbois and proud daughter of Jennifer Hopelezz. Taka Taka sees life through the lens of Dragtivism by producing weekly parties and para-educational strategies for the margins of the marginal LGBTQIA ++ community. Taka Taka is the co-founder of Drag King Academy Amsterdam and collaborates yearly as the House of Hopelezz art director-producer-performer and/or curator with institutes and collectives such as: SOA/AIDS Nederland; Global Aids Village; Aids Healthcare Foundation, Amsterdam; Pianola Museum for Museum Nacht, Wende Snijders Kaleidoscope at Koninklijk Carré Theater, Drag Olympics at Homomonument, Begging Babes at Paradiso, Superball, the Battle of European Drag Houses at Paradiso, Queer Porn film night at Compagnie Theater, NoPantsNoProblemat Global AIDS conferences, Kids friendly queer Streetheart Festival at Kerkstraat, PrEPnu, Milkshake Festival-Erwin Olaf stage, City Collective Amsterdam, House of Yes-New York and more.
They have shared their knowledge and methodologies for gender-queer artistic practices and its intersections with HIV through interviews, lectures and essays with: If I can’t Dance; ‘Open! Platform for Art, Culture and the Public Domain, Lost and Found, Nacht van de Nacht, and Perdu. Taka Taka has held workshops around Dragtivism and Character construction for: Dutch Design Week-Albert van Abbehuis, Mediamatic, Queer Rotterdam, and Art Academies such as: SNDO-School for New Dance Development, Practise Held in Common - MA in Fine Art and Design, (ArtEZ), Studium Generale Rietveld Academie. -
I’ve been thinking about responsiveness and responsibility. Who’s counting, who counts? Who are the accountants? Who judges? What is soft and who is hard? When are we fragile? When are we listening? When am I response-able? When and how am I able to respond and to what? To who? I have lots of questions and I feel like reading about how characters in stories respond might help me understand where my questions spring from. I want to feel my limbs differently, so that when I get to be part of putting (body) parts back together (re-membering as an active presentness) I’ll be more ready.
Add-ons / limbs / parts / apart / farts / sparks / fairies / friends / becoming (a) Prince / glyphs / dancing / tempo / sss / thighs / crowns / caress / un / tetherings / versionings /A / morph
Featured texts: The Faggots and Their Friends, Larry Mitchell and Ned Asta; The Trojan Girl, N. K. Jemisin; Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Elizabeth Freeman; Vava Dudu, Vava Dudu; Hoe de eerste vonken zichtbaar waren (How the First Sparks Became Visible), Simone Atangana Bekono; Nachtuilen, Edna Azulay; Apsara Engine, Bishakh Som; The Beautiful Ones, Prince (biography); Revolutionary Girl Utena, Chiho & Be-Papas Saito; Writing the Body: Edouard Glissant's Poetics of Re-membering; J. Michael Dash; Tentacle (La mucama de Omicunlé), Rita Indiana
October 21; November 4, 18; December 2; January 6, 20; February 10; March 3, 17:00-18:30, Library
In principle, participation in a group concerns the entire series.
Sign in here: https://outlook.office365.com/owa/calendar/StudiumGenerale1@grac.onmicrosoft.com/bookings/
Jay Tan was born in London and watched a lot of TV growing up. They moved to the Netherlands in 2008, completed the MFA at the Piet Zwart Institute in 2010 and were a 2014/15 resident at the Rijksakademie. Based in Rotterdam, they make sculptures and installations, sometimes with video, sound, or other moving parts, often with a focus on domestic mechanics and decoration, and currently teach at the Masters of Artistic Research programme at KABK, Den Haag and the Fine Arts Department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam. They have shown work at the CACC Paris, Ujazdowski Castle, Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, Ellen de Bruijne projects and Galerie van Gelder, Amsterdam, Futura, Prague, Kunstverein, Amsterdam, Vleeshal, Middleburg, the CAC, Vilnius, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Hollybush Gardens, London, Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam and RongWrong, Amsterdam.
Images: Apsara Engine by Bishakh Som -
The online reading group 'ruins are relics' is borrowing its title from Etel Adnan's poetry to speak about vexed cartographies and untamed optics when thinking nearby, with and beyond the body. Drawing on bodies dislocated, starving and disobedient, on bodies transcendental, manifesting (unrequited) desires and oppressions and pains, the reading group aims to find a trajectory for wording that, which cannot be fully grasped through language. Through researching on imbricating histories, on subjects varying from indigeneity, migration and diaspora to mental breaks and physical wounds, the monthly sessions will try to disrupt 'normal realities' paraphrasing the words of the artist Alina Popa, to become with otherworldly feelings and demonised fragilities. Each of the sessions will include a series of collective readings and tasks based on poetic theses, mythic narratives and somatic rituals. The students will also be invited to initiate their own exercises according to their desires and needs.
With texts, poems, films, works and sound pieces by: Gayatri Gopinath, Etel Adnan, Black Elk/John G. Neihardt, Vijay Prashad, Achille Mbembe, Nayan Shah, Juliet Jacques, Jack Halberstam, Akram Zaatari, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Janis Rafa, Wai Chee Deamock and Ramon Amaro, among others.
October 21; November 4, 18; December 2; January 6, 20; February 10; March 3, 17:00-18:30, Online
In principle, participation in a group concerns the entire series.
Sign in here: https://outlook.office365.com/owa/calendar/StudiumGenerale1@grac.onmicrosoft.com/bookings/
Ioanna Gerakidi is a writer, curator and educator based in Athens and Amsterdam. She has collaborated with and curated group shows/events for State of Concept (Athens), Amsterdam Art, Athens Biennale, Athens Digital Arts Festival, Hot Wheels Projects (Athens), Haus N (Athens) and more. Her texts have been presented at Kunstverein Amsterdam, Stroom (Den Hague), Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, CAC Vilnius, Carlos/Ishikawa (London), and NiMAC (Nicosia), among others. She has contributed in several publications and she has lectured or led workshops for Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Athens School of Fine Arts, Document & Contemporary Art PhD program, Onassis Air Residency, AKV St. Joost Den Bosch and Noiserr. Some of her past residencies include Rupert Residency, Syros Sound Meetings and NEON Curatorial Exchange Program. Projects of hers have been funded by Mondriaan Fonds, Outset Funds and Rupert Residency.
Images from: Faith Ringgold's Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles, 1997, and from: Kathy Acker's manuscript Blood and Guts in High School -
Walking is first and foremost a relational enterprise that calls for a constant dialogue between what constitutes the self and all visible and invisible entities, human and non-human alike. It implies an emergence into, and a traversing through an intertwined web of past and present occurrences; of summons, of memory recollections, of their endoscopic translations, of incidental encounters; instigated not only by the enchanting qualities of a given topology but also by the realization that we are destined to walk on where others have walked before us (taking that literally as well as metaphorically).
Ignited by these thoughts, What We Walk About When We Talk About Walking is devised as a collective study of bi-weekly perambulations set to traverse histories of walking enhanced by subjective narratives and views on the city as a body and our bodies as maps. It will further attempt to reclaim ‘cruising’ as a queer approach to ‘drifting’ (dérive). Our wanderings in flesh (and their discursive components) are to shape the study into two parts: four thematic sessions informed by textual, sonic and audiovisual references and three final sessions working and ‘walking’ towards a public gestural moment.
Walking comrades: Rebecca Solnit, Francesco Careri, Frederic Gross, Michel de Certeau, Merlin Coverly, Alexandra Horowitz, Jose Esteban Munoz, David Wojnarowicz and more.
(The title is an adaptation of Raymond Carver’s short stories collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.)
October 28; November 11, 25; December 9; February 3, 17; March 10, 17:00-18:30, Outdoor
In principle, participation in a group concerns the entire series.
Sign in here: https://outlook.office365.com/owa/calendar/StudiumGenerale1@grac.onmicrosoft.com/bookings/
Nikos Doulos is a visual artist, curator and educator. In his work, he creates malleable situations as participatory infrastructures and ‘soft’ knowledge generators. Walking holds a predominant part in his practice. He is a co-director at Expodium in Utrecht – an urban do-tank that utilizes artistic means to talk about the city. In 2011, and under Expodium’s umbrella, he founded NIGHTWALKERS – a participatory nocturnal walking project investigating the contemporary identity of the flanêur/flâneuse, performed in (among others) the Netherlands, Serbia, Sweden, Finland, Italy, Hungary, South Korea and Greece. Nikos participated at Capacete Athens – a nine-month residency in Athens under the broader framework of Documenta 14 (2017), led workshops for UNIDEE - Cittadelartte Pistoletto Foundation (2016) and the University of the Arts, Uniarts Helsinki (2013 - 2017) and guest edited, together with Herbert Ploegman, Kunstlicht Volume: 39 - ‘Unpacking Residencies: Situating The Production Of Cultural Relations’ (2019). He is currently guest tutoring along with the rest of the Expodium members at the Spatial Practice objective of the HKU MaFA (Utrecht) and holds a position as a coordinator at the Dutch Art Institute/ DAI. -
In this series of 4 online seminars, we will explore the implications of "embodiment": whereby 'body' is meant as a territory with no fixed boundaries, as a body amidst other bodies, in the space of the possible between bodies. As politics control and shape bodies, theories, language and practice speculate to liberate those very same bodies: what does it imply to review and unlearn, rewrite histories and reclaim space, in that continuous movement between inside and outside, between our own body and the body of others? How do we inhabit our body? How do we enact politics? What do we do with theory?
Provisional Bibliography: Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly; Audre Lorde, The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House, Emma Goldman, Anarchy and the Sex Question; Paul B. Preciado, Anal Terror and Countersexual Manifesto; Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts; Larry Mitchell and Ned Asta, The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions
This seminar series is intended for students who are not yet familiar with critical theory but are curious to gain insight into the underlying concepts of the current edition of the Studium Generale.
October 21; November 4, 18; December 2, from 17:00-18:30, Online
In principle, participation in a group concerns the entire series.
Sign in here: https://outlook.office365.com/owa/calendar/StudiumGenerale1@grac.onmicrosoft.com/bookings/
Giulia Crispiani is a writer and visual artist based in Rome, where she is an editor for NERO Editions. She holds degrees in a Bachelor of Industrial Design, University of Rome Sapienza, Rome (2005—2009); Bachelor of Art (Ceramics) with Honors (Art & Research with University of Amsterdam) from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam (2011—2015); and a Master of Art Praxis, Dutch Art Institute, Arnhem (2015—2017). She had been involved in independent projects between Amsterdam, Tehran and Beirut and she was recently part of the exhibitions Coming Soon at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino (2018) and But We Don’t Leave Pyramids at Charsoohonar, Tehran (2019). In her artistic practice she brings together her backgrounds in industrial design, object making, philosophy and art theory, as text and image based works that manifest in live and printed formats such as performances and publications.
Images: Photo taken during the Iranian Revolution (1978-79) from the book Bahman Jalali (2011), and still from Jean Genet's film Un Chant d'Amour (1950) -
on zoooom @https://us02web.zoom.us/j/3251816401
*Meeting ID: 325 181 6401
In the context of the walking club What We Walk About When We Talk About Walking, Nikos Doulos will deliver an online talk on night walking as a relational and a corporeal enterprise to the nocturnal city. Taking as a starting point the project Walking Home – A Nightwalkers Session (2017) in relation to Jean Cocteau’s Orphée (1950) and Odysseus descent to the underworld, Nikos will attempt to ‘walk’ the prospects of nightly perambulations as modes of meaningful encountering with oneself, the city and its spectres.
Nikos Doulos is a visual artist, curator, and educator. In his work, he creates malleable situations as participatory infrastructures and ‘soft’ knowledge generators. Walking holds a predominant part in his practice. He is a co-director at Expodium in Utrecht – an urban do-tank that utilizes artistic means to talk about the city. In 2011, and under Expodium’s umbrella, he founded NIGHTWALKERS – a participatory nocturnal walking project investigating the contemporary identity of the flanêur/flâneuse, performed in (among others) the Netherlands, Serbia, Sweden, Finland, Italy, Hungary, South Korea, and Greece. -
In this virtual zoooom presentation, dragtivist Taka Taka will carefully consider the workings and needs of different activist artists' collective practices through a lens of Cybernetics. Taka Taka will look at the historic collectives ACT-UP; Gran Fury; and the Guerilla Girls; as well as into the role of Drag performers in AIDS/HIV activism.
Taka Taka identifies as a professional drag-thing and edu-curator who produces performances as art director for the Amsterdam cruise club Church. Taka Taka sees drag as an amplified voice, whose purpose is to communicate, problematize, and propose methods according to local (Amsterdam) conditions. Taka Taka is the godmother of the House of Hopelezz, a sister for others, mother of the drag king House of Løstbois, and proud daughter of Jennifer Hopelezz. Taka Taka sees life through the lens of Dragtivism by producing weekly parties and para-educational strategies for the margins of the marginal LGBTQIA ++ community including political and gender asylum seekers, friends with the virus, misfits, and party monsters. -
After decades of budget cuts, a rise in populism, and the challenges to public assembly posed by the coronavirus, the continued existence of museums has never been more threatened. Yet museums have also rightfully been called upon to change, and have struggled to more equitably represent in their collections and workforces the societies that they serve. How and why should we fight to save institutions if they’re inherently so flawed?
This twofold crisis in the museum field has arisen alongside a general crisis of the social welfare state. In particular, the healthcare sector has become financialized to the point of dysfunction, with access to care oftentimes being dependent upon one’s personal circumstances. The ability to live a productive life—and within the cultural field, to live and make work as an artist—has thus become dependent upon our individual ability to overcome adversity.
The group exhibition After Institutions, slated to open last October at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam but indefinitely postponed due to the coronavirus, examines the state of public institutions and their relation to economic contexts and social movements. Curated by Stedelijk Curator of Contemporary Art Karen Archey, the exhibition focuses on renewing the discourse around and expanding the canon of Institutional Critique.
KAREN ARCHEY is Curator of Contemporary Art at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. She is an American curator and art critic formerly based in Berlin and New York. At the Stedelijk, Archey is responsible for the contemporary art and time-based media collections. Since joining the museum in 2017, Archey has organized solo exhibitions by artists Rineke Dijkstra, Stefan Tcherepnin, Catherine Christer Hennix, Steffani Jemison, Jeff Preiss, and Metahaven, as well as the group exhibition Freedom of Movement: the 2018 Municipal Art Acquisitions. She is currently working toward solo exhibitions by artists Charlotte Prodger and Hito Steyerl. Within the Stedelijk’s performance program Archey has recently commissioned new works by Jennifer Tee, Ann Hirsch, Alicia Frankovich, and artist collective CFGNY. She heads the Stedelijk’s research initiative on the acquisition and documentation of time-based media.
Archey previously worked as an independent curator and editor for the New York-based organization e-flux. In 2014, she organized with Robin Peckham the exhibition “Art Post-Internet” at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. In 2015, Archey was awarded a Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for short-form writing. She frequently lectures on contemporary art and time-based media. -
My Response to Racism is Anger: Transforming Rage into Power is a performance lecture by Naomie Pieter. The title is inspired by Audre Lorde’s essay The Uses of Anger: Women(1) Responding to Racism (1981). Pieter reflects on and responds to the essay through the political actions she (co)organised and choreographed. She will also share some of her Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices which she uses to create art performances and political actions.
(1)Pieter adds: Black Queer, Trans, Enby, Gender-non conforming people.
Intersectional queer and anti-racist activist Naomie Pieter (1990) is the founder of Pon Di Pride and co-founder of Black Queer & Trans Resistance NL, as well as the founder of Black Pride NL. She won the Roze Lieverdje award 2020 for her work within the LGBTQIA+ community and she recently won the Pax Peace Award 2020. After her training as a choreographer at the Academy for Theatre and Dance in Amsterdam, Naomie effortlessly mixes the organisation of protest rallies with designing choreographies. “Protest is a social choreography. We're organizing body, space and time. Who walks up front, what are the visuals, what is the stage?" Pieter is one of the artists who has been invited by the Amsterdam Museum to participate in the museum's new exhibition of the Gouden Koets 2021. -
A Daily Practice - One is always a plural is a public talk by Yael Davids. During the talk, Davids will give a short Feldenkrais class and demonstrate a sitting position as a response to the physical position of the attendees (online and offline) and to the Covid-19 limitations in spatial movement. The Feldenkrais Method is a method of somatic learning that invites a change of bodily habits from within. Yael is building on her three-year research in the context of the Creator Doctus (CrD) program, which was supported by the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Van Abbemuseum and which she successfully concluded with a public defense on 28 September this year.
YAEL DAVIDS (Jerusalem, 1968) studied visual arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, sculpture at the Pratt Institute in New York and choreography and dance education at the Remscheid Akademie in Remscheid. In her work she examines the capacities in which the body operates as a documentary vessel. She studies how collective heritage and socially charged narratives become intertwined with the individual’s biography and sensibilities, surmounting to an experiencing of the concrete world that is defined by a unique finitude. Over the past five years, Davids has formally trained in the Feldenkrais Method. She uses the Method as a research device for comprehending the inner-workings of structures and prevailing tendencies — bodily, institutionally, artistically. Her three-year-long research trajectory focuses on learning conditions and duties of care, and addresses a range of questions such as: How can we reform the prevailing trope of learning being a competitive, mentally demanding experience? How can we integrate other learning processes, beyond the common optic experience? How can the relation between student and teacher be more democratic? How can we support the practice of self-reflection and individual interpretation. How can we think differently about limitation?
You can watch the presentation here: -
Quinsy Gario will reflect on the work that he and Mina Ouaouirst collaborated on for In The Presence of Absence, the municipal acquisitions exhibition in Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (20/09/05-21/01/31). Gario and Ouaouirst grapple with the responses and aftermaths of colonization and occupation in Morocco, Tobago and Latvia. The work centers the life of St. Maurice through literal and figurative weaving practices and departs from the urge to repair the absence of knowledge on the life of St. Maurice. All we know of him is parsed through a lens of servitude to others; as a soldier for the Roman empire, as a martyr canonized by the Catholic Church and as a patron saint of the Blackheads Brotherhood. The work attempts to contemplate how to fill in the gaps of knowledge with improvisational singing, poetry, carpet weaving, photography, video, sound works, and collage. Each with their own timing but woven together in the exhibition through affinity. In the lecture, Gario will weave together the varying threads that come together in the work and contemplate strategies of repair for colonial violence.
Quinsy Gario is a performance poet and visual artist from Curaçao and St. Maarten. His work centers on decolonial remembering and unsettling institutional and interpersonal normalizations of colonial practices. Gario's most well-known work, Zwarte Piet Is Racisme (2011–2012), sought to denormalize the racist Dutch figure and practice of Zwarte Piet (Black Pete). His current practice attempts to delink from gendered and Westernized artistic genealogies by working together with his family and family of friends. He has an academic background from Utrecht University in media studies, gender studies and postcolonial studies and is a graduate of the Master Artistic Research program of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. Gario received the Royal Academy Master Thesis Prize 2017, the Black Excellence Award 2016, the Amsterdam Fringe Festival Silver Award 2015, The Kerwin Award 2014 and the Hollandse Nieuwe 12 Theatermakers Prize 2011. His work has been shown in Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), MACBA (Barcelona), SMBA (Amsterdam), MHKA (Antwerp), Witte de With (Rotterdam) and Göteborgs Konsthall (Göteborg). In 2017 he received a Humanity in Action Detroit Fellowship and he is a 2017/2018 BAK Fellow. Gario is a member of the collectives The State of L3 and Family Connection and is currently a participant of the Advanced Performance And Scenography Studies program in Brussels.
You can watch the lecture here:
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“The claim of equality is not only spoken or written, but is made precisely when bodies appear together or, rather, when, through their action, they bring the space of appearance into being.” — Judith Butler
This year's Studium Generale Rietveld Academie is about different experiences and manifestations of the body, and about (dis)embodiments in art and life. We have become hyper aware of our bodies and those of others: Through Covid-19, the quarantines and guidelines for physical distancing, we are not only dealing with (our) viral bodies, vulnerable bodies and lonely bodies; in attempts to continue life, we manifest ourselves nonstop behind our screens as virtual bodies and data bodies. This creates new life forms, but also more techniques to be controlled, excluded and manipulated. For much longer we have been dealing with social and political differentiations that are made between bodies that matter and those that would matter less. All over the world, protest is embodied by people assembling and allying in resistance.
What are experimental and emancipating strategies and practices for fluid embodiments? How can we form resistant collective bodies without losing our own subjectivity and fleshy "matter"? How can we think about this from art practice and theory?
“It is precisely because our bodies are the new enclaves of biopower and because our apartments are the new cells of biovigilance that it is more urgent than ever to invent new strategies of cognitive emancipation and resistance.” — Paul B. Preciado
Preliminary Programme at Rietveld (and online)
September 23; Oktober 21, 28; November 4, 11, 18, 25; December 2, 9; January 6, 13, 20; February 3, 10, 17; March 3, 10, 17
Conference-festival and Rietveld Uncut at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam:
March 24, 25, 26, 27 -
2019-2020
The Art of Critique
Image PowerThe artistic movement of Institutional Critique feels particularly urgent today, as we are witnessing an intense moment of “institutional critique” in society at large. Fueled by social media, the critique of institutions – think of phenomena like #MeToo, Brexit and the large scale climate protests – is practiced everywhere with an intensity and at a scale that seems unmatched.
At the same time, one can question whether it still makes sense to treat the art world as a separate institutional field now that art institutions align themselves more and more with profit-oriented thinking and impulses generated within the art field are quickly swallowed up by a larger creative industry.
Taking into account these developments, The Art of Critique asks what constitutes a practice of Institutional Critique today. -
2019—2020
Relating (to) Colour
Wednesday, January 15, 22; February 5, 12, 26; March 4, 11, 18, Rietveld Academie; Conference-festival & Rietveld Uncut: March 25-28, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
“Colour... is new each time” — Roland Barthes
Studium Generale Rietveld 2019—2020 focuses on histories, politics, and perceptions of colour in the creation and understanding aesthetic forms, social structures, and embodied experiences. Colour structures our daily life and our actions, our relationships with others and the spaces in which we live. Within different historical and cultural contexts, however, colours have very different symbolic, psychological, material, and socio-political meanings. Relating (to) Colour wants to see colour in art, science, technology, and life beyond the purely symbolic and aesthetic and not as self-evident or universal, but as a physical, material, cultural, and political phenomenon. We try to understand colour not only as visual, sensual, or textual but especially as a lived experience and relational concept that creates affect and agency.
With: David Batchelor, Taka Taka, Imara Limon, Nancy Jouwe, Sekai Makoni, Erik Viskil, Wieteke van Zeil, Adam Broomberg, Sara Blokland, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Patricia Pisters, Isabel Cordeiro, Joke Robaard, Melanie Bühler, Jay Tan, Ioanna Gerakidi, Ola Hassanain & Casco Art Institute, Stefano Harney, Rietveld Uncut, Fumi Okiji, Ronald Rose-Antoinette, Eddie George, Dhanveer Singh Brar, Nisrine Chaer, Pieter Paul Pothoven, Danielle Dean, Simone Zeefuik, Ying Que, Egbert Alejandro Martina, Nina F. Bell, Nermin Elsherif, Quinsy Gario, MamaKil, and many others. -
“(...) It matters what stories tell stories. It matters what thoughts think thoughts. It matters what worlds make worlds (...)” — Donna Haraway
Studium Generale Rietveld Academie invites you to think of “fabulation”. As a means of “fabricating the real”, world-making or “speculative fiction”. As an artistic, social and political capacity, welcoming alternative histories and other regimes of wanting, being and becoming. Practices of fabulation may enable saying things that are not used in order to distinguish truth from lies but to effectively say things better, to unsettle and to include. Come and take a walk on the wild side with us!
With: Mieke Bal, Wayne Modest, Geo Wyeth, Patricia Kaersenhout, Charl Landvreugd, Simon(e) van Saarloos, Alison Sperling, Sher Doruff, Sven Lütticken, Kunstverein, Hypatia Vourloumis, Nwando Ebizie, Gayatri Gopinath, Monsur Mansoor, Amber Jamilla Musser, Shaowen Bardzell, Sarah Sharma, Sandra Ruiz, Jackie Wang, Daniela K. Rosner, Tavia Nyong’o, Tina Campt, Jayna Brown, Alice Chauchat, Rosalind Nashashibi, Isabel Lewis, Luke Willis Thompson, Naima Ramos Chapman, Tiona Nekkia McCLodden, and many others. -
Singing the Blues and Coming up for Air: Not Just Overcoming but Embracing the Odds; The Act of Listening; Wildness; Quadrant, situational performance, 50:00.
With: Aminata Cairo, Nagaré Willemsen and Rosanne Jonkhout, Unsettling Rietveld Sandberg, Taka Taka, Joy Mariama Smith, Yolande van der Heide. -
Touch is of vital importance to our emotional and neurobiological development. So how do we feel and more specifically touch in our technologically mediated dematerialized digital cultures? Do we solely stroke and swipe our screens? How is the body and its feel involved? Are we in fact cultivating different tactilities in relation to the world and others? Further, how can we trace the ways in which touch informs and reforms the body with respect to violence, gender, sexuality, democracy, and identity? If art and design have privileged sight and sound, should touch – and all the senses – be addressed and activated in order to help us stay ‘in touch’ with our bodies and the material world?
With: Karen Archey, Army of Love, boychild, Karen Barad, Rizvana Bradley, Sarah Browne, Staci Bu Shea, Fiona Candlin, Holly Childs, Yvonne Dröge Wendel, João Florêncio, Ioanna Gerakidi, Ine Gevers, Amelia Groom, Jack Halberstam, Jort van der Laan, Erin Manning, Laura U. Marks, Marianna Maruyama, Mark Paterson, Paul Preciado, Joke Robaard, Charlotte Rooijackers, Eloise Sweetman, Wu Tsang, Hypatia Vourloumis, Eyal Weizman, and many others. -
“The brain is not ahistorical, fixed, or atemporal. (…) the brain is always situated in a body and self, and thus in social relations, in family, community, in culture and the economy, in the local and the global, in history.” (From Victoria Pitts-Taylor’s NeuroCultures Manifesto, 2012)
Culture and brain form complex systems of influence, control, and resistance. The present brain seems to have been invaded by technology: machines increasingly perform the previously human tasks of language, memory, and imagination. Our learning processes are taken up by automated and algorithmic procedures. What are the philosophical, social and political implications of this cognitive automation for our brains and bodies? What is happening to our subjectivity, identity, and free will? What about the artist’s brain?
With: Stephan Schleim, Patricia Pisters, Antonia Majaca, Fiona Kearney, Marcos Lutyens, Franco Berardi Bifo, Tony D. Sampson, Bassam el Baroni, Michele Rizzo, Yuk Hui, Flora Lysen, Erik Rietveld, Warren Neidich, André Lepecki, Melanie Bühler, Victoria Pitts-Taylor, Hannah Barton, Jennifer Chan, Paul Feigelfeld, Daniel Keller, Elizabeth Orr, Özgür Kar, Timotheus Vermeulen, John C. Welchman, Daniel Pinchbeck, Florencia Portocarrero, Lars Bang Larsen, Patricia Clough, Mette Edvardsen, Leon Hilton, Anne Juren, and many others. -
What does it mean for art making if the “human” is but one life form among many?
“In the similarity of clowns to animals the likeness of humans to apes flashes up: the constellation animal/fool/clown is a fundamental layer of art.” (Theodor W. Adorno quoted by Anselm Franke in Ape Culture, 2015)
This year’s Studium Generale Rietveld Academie is about bots, bodies, and beasts. It focuses on the notion of the posthuman and the blurring of the traditional distinctions between the human and its others – be these bots or beasts. How can a notion of the posthuman be a tool for understanding the present? How can it help us make sense of our flexible and multiple identities? Can it redefine humanity’s place in the technological and biological continuums we are part of? Together we will dive into dialogue with posthumanism, (dis)embodiment and the dismantling of the liberal humanist and anthropocentric “subject”.
With: Anselm Franke, Maaike Lauwaert, Karen Archey, Cécile B. Evans, Hans-Christian Dany, Neïl Beloufa, Geo Wyeth, Mohammad Salemy, Amanda Beech, Matteo Pasquinelli, Victoria Ivanova, Xavier Le Roy, Keti Chukhrov, Alicia Frankovich, If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, Brian Holmes, Filipa Ramos, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Alexandra Anikina, Jan Peter Hammer, Harun Farocki, and many others. -
ARE YOU ALIVE OR NOT? Looking at ART through the lens of THEATRE proposes itself as a “modus operandi” for generating knowledge, ideas, questions, collaborations, happenings, and things. The project takes its initial inspiration from a wish expressed in the introduction to Claire Bishop's book Artificial Hells, Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship:
“It is hoped that these chapters might give momentum to rethinking the history of twentieth-century art through the lens of theatre rather than painting or the ready-made.”
With: Claire Bishop, Nikolaus Gansterer, Maximilian Haas, Mette Ingvartsen, André Lepecki, Gavin Butt, Annie Dorsen, Alexandra Pirici, Jesse Darling, Claire Tancons, Claire Bishop, Joanna Warsza, Milo Rau, Ekaterina Degot, Chto Delat, Artur Zmijewski, Florian Malzacher, Rana Hamadeh, Mårten Spångberg, Joanna Warsza, David Weber-Krebs, and many others. -
2013—2014
VOICE
Creature of Transition“[…] the voice is elusive, always changing, becoming, elapsing, with unclear contours […]” – Mladen Dolar in: A Voice And Nothing More (2006)
An increasing number of makers and thinkers, in sweeping and often groundbreaking ways, are concerned with the phenomenon of “voice”. Numerous exhibitions, symposia and publications continue to be dedicated to the physical, mythical, psychoanalytic, political, philosophical, legal and performative potential of “voice”. By looking into theory, literature, film, theater, visual art, popular culture and society at large, Studium Generale Rietveld Academie explores the potential for “pleasure” and “power” offered by the voice and invites you to ask yourself what vistas, at the dawn of the 21st century, “voice” has in store for you.
With: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Ali Kaviani, Tom Rice, Gregory Whitehead, Maha Maamoun, Susan Gibb, Sharon Hayes, Francesco Ventrella, Wendelien van Oldenberg, Alex Martinis Roe, Ruth Noack, May Adadol Ingawanij, Imogen Stidworthy, Danica Dakić, Luis Jacob, Susanne Oberbeck (No Bra), Mark Beasley, Joan La Barbara, Nicholas Bullen, Gelsey Bell, I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, and many more. -
By exploring the potentialities of ecological worldviews, old and new, through theory and art, WHERE ARE WE GOING, WALT WHITMAN? seeks to accelerate, accumulate, animate and activate our poetical and political understanding of the world. The project will not map a North, South, East, West. No upside, no downside, no center, no periphery, no order, no border. It rather reveals a meshwork of criss-cross paths, rhythms, and flows. It wants to be a guide for self-learners wishing to think freely and critically about and through art and 'a thousand ecologies'.
With: Nishant Shah, João Florêncio, Marius de Geus, TJ Demos, Diedrich Diederichsen, Erich Hörl, Armin Linke, The Otolith Group, Angela Melitopoulos, Ei Awakara, Binna Choi, Bracha Ettinger, Sabu Kohso, Stefan Tcherepnin, Natasha Ginwala, Rosalind Morris, Olof Olsson, Ayreen Anastas, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Vinciane Despret, Rene Gabri, Fernando García-Dory, Marcos Lutyens, and many more. -
Drawing inspiration from The Role of a Lifetime (2003), by artist and filmmaker Deimantas Narkevičius WE ARE THE TIME explores the role of lifetime and life experience as a crucial source of ideas and inspirations, as a force that shapes ones’ art practice. Life experience is always generated as the intersection between the personal rhythm of one’s life and the larger societal perspective. How do we position ourselves in time? What are the decisive moments in our personal lives? What is our relation to the historical moment or context? How do we weave them into our life-narratives?
With: Deimantas Narkevičius, Foundland, Ruth Noack, IRWIN, Bojan Fajfrić, Ernst van den Hemel, Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson, Rosa Barba, Rana Hamadeh, Tony Chakar, James Beckett, Rossella Biscotti, Kathrin Rhomberg, Jeffrey Babcock, Charles Esche, Arnisa Zeqo & Laurie Cluitmans, Sam de Groot, Chto Delat, Ann Demeester, Tai Shani, Fay Nicholson, Maria Hlavajova, Irit Rogoff, Hiwa K, Franco Berardi, Chicago Boys – While We Were Singing They Were Dreaming, AA Bronson, Yael Davids, Adrian Rifkin, David Dibosa, Grant Watson, Boris Groys, Anneke Smelik, Alfredo Cramerotti, and many more.
About
In the belief that art students can only learn to think independently when knowledge, imagination and reflection combine to work together in an unorthodox and critical way, Studium Generale Rietveld aims to encourage critical forms of learning, making and thinking. It follows a new research trajectory every year around a specific theme that links up with current events, issues and discussions in the (art) world. Artists and theoreticians from home and abroad offer a broad spectrum of perspectives on the overarching themes with lectures, performances, presentations and screenings.
After a preliminary programme, which also includes film screenings, reading groups, workshops and publications, there is an annual four-day conference festival in collaboration with guest curators who make contact with urgent critical discourses from different perspectives and practices. This takes place at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and is open to the public.
Since 2014 Studium Generale teams up with Rietveld Uncut; departments and individual students develop projects in relation to the theoretical framework of Studium Generale. The presentation and exhibition of these programmes is simultaneous to the conference, bringing ‘the making and the thinking’ together.
Contact
studiumgenerale@rietveldacademie.nl
Frederik Roeskestraat 96, 1076 ED Amsterdam
Head of Programme
Jorinde Seijdel
Coordinator
Jort van der Laan
Technical Assistance
Jeroen Vermandere
Press and PR
Public Rietveld
Copy Editing
Janine Armin
Photo and Video
Malthe Stigaard
Web Design
Rietlanden Women’s Office
Web Development
Posthuman Sunbathing
Typefaces
Mrs Eaves by Zuzana Licko
Art Nouveau Bistro by Christina Torre