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 13, 17; March 10, 17:00-18:30, Fedlev Auditorium


In principle, participation in a group concerns the entire series.

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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

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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.

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 13, 17; March 10, 17:00-18:30, Outdoor

In principle, participation in a group concerns the entire series.

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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.

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.

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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

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.

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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)

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: