Welcome to the Studium Generale Rietveld Academie website! To encourage critical making and thinking, Studium Generale offers a diverse and transdisciplinary programme every year on an urgent theme. Read more about the set-up and structure here.

This website consists of 3 substantive and informative layers that constantly feed each other.

The Programme Overview home page displays announcements of ongoing events and activities, and provides instant access to their live streams when appropriate.

Below the Programme overview is the Archive Picks area, which presents varying selections of older programme contributions, curated by guests or by ourselves. Older contributions can thus regain attention or meaning, or be presented in alternative arrangements.

At the bottom is the Archive. There you will find material from 2011 to the present: part of the video-recorded contributions to the annual conference of Studium Generale and since March 2020 also recordings of events and presentations of the preliminary programmes. The archive is searchable in various ways and offers a chronological overview of previous editions and links to the associated project websites. It also contains announcements and descriptions of previous programme components, which can no longer be relived, but do provide some glances in the histories of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie.

The purpose of the website is to inform and present what is happening at the moment, but it is also a memory, in which a lot can be found and unexpected encounters can take place.

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N.B. This website is still under construction! Not everything has been completed yet and the search functions in the Archive are not yet fully functional.

A Fierce Organicism: Ecologies of Enmeshment in Contemporary Speculative Art
Jayna Brown

Jayna Brown’s areas of knowledge and interest include black expressive cultures, film, queer of colour critique, anarchism, materialism, and science fiction. Her first book, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and The Shaping of the Modern (2008) won Best Book awards from both the American Society for Theatre Research and the Theater Library Association. She has also published on African-American race film and popular performance in various journals including The Journal of Popular Music Studies, GLQ, Social Text, and Women and Performance. Her new book, Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds* is forthcoming from Duke University Press and traces black radical utopian practice and performance, from the psychic travels of Sojourner Truth to the cosmic transmissions of Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra.

Jayna Brown is Professor in the Graduate Program in Media Studies at Pratt Institute, New York. She teaches and writes about science fiction, Afro-surrealism, black feminism and queer theory, performance, and media.