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.

What is it like to be an eel? Imagination, Representation and Direct Experience
Sheng-Wen Lo

We may have been living near the sea, but do we really know what is going on beneath the water surface? If not, how do we navigate our relationships with others that are not accessible by senses and subaquatic probes? From hermit crabs in Taiwan to European eels in the Netherlands, Sheng-Wen Lo explores the possibility of (re)connecting with oceanic non-humans through creative interventions.

SHENG-WEN LO’s works investigate the relationships and dynamics between non-humans and contemporary society, often taking daily experiences as points of departure. As a maker his practice comprises still/moving images, installations, video games, and various media. During his residency at the Rijksakademie, he joined the European eel research team at the Embassy of the North Sea, and created a sensory-based escape room ‘F/EEL’. Sheng-Wen Lo has been teaching in Kunstakademie Karlshule in Germany and HSLU in Switzerland; his recent projects were shown in Foam Fotografiemuseum, EYE Filmmuseum, World Press Photo, and Marineterrein Amsterdam in The Netherlands, MMCA in Korea, UCCA in China, National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Australia, and Taiwan Biennial at NTMoFA. He received fellowships from