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.

Militance Is an Alternative to Madness
Patricia Kaersenhout

In 2017 Patricia Kaersenhout realized the community art project Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner Too? With this project, Kaersenhout provides a response to The Dinner Party (1979), the most famous work of feminist artist Judy Chicago which celebrates strong women but underrepresents women of color. Kaersenhout criticises this installation by showing a large, richly decorated dining table in triangular form, full of symbolism, to which 36 Black women and women of color, “heroines of resistance”, are honored. Her lecture will address her social practice and she will talk about erasure and dignity. Kaersenhout is part of an international network of artists and scientists engaged in decolonial aesthetics/aesthesis and has exhibitions in the Netherlands and abroad.

Patricia Kaersenhout is a Dutch visual artist and cultural activist. Born in the Netherlands but a descendant from Surinamese parents. Kaersenhout has pursued an artistic path exploring the relationship between her background and her Western European education. The political thread in her work raises questions about the African Diaspora’s movements and its relation to feminism, sexuality, racism and the history of slavery. She considers her art practice to be a social one. With her projects she empowers (young) men and women of color.