The editorial board was created in 2019 as a 5 year project part of the Quality Agreements. Its objective is to stimulate extracurricular, experimental and student driven education at the Rietveld Academie and Sandberg Instituut. Set out to facilitate 13 educational platforms during that period through an annual open call, it has now entered what is possibly its last cycle.
In the fall of 2023 the editorial board received 18 outstanding proposals from the academy community, for which there was enough funding to support two.
Strong and well researched project plans from students and staff proposed to research rest and sleep, experimental publishing, the hegemony of European typography, solidarity with non-EU students, open source tools, remix culture, the uses of the voice, playtime, and many other exciting topics. The knowledge production at the GRA/SI would greatly benefit from all of these projects being able to take place.
Weighing the project proposals against contemporary needs and which topics are presently addressed by the academy, the editorial board selected two initiatives to start in January 2024:
Rippling Replicas and Interlude.
Everytime we touch, I get this feeling. The creation of all art is deeply entangled with activation of the body, be that moving the arm across the painting or dragging the touchpad to zoom in on the virtual object. What can we learn about the way our bodies are intended and inclined in artmaking processes by experimenting with performing art forms and practices, such as dance, movement research, somatic meditation etc? Toitoitoi is a research platform interested in examining the ripple effects that are created in engagement with material beyond singular mediums. It intends to investigate the continuities, modifications and conversations that result from the alterations of ways we perceive our bodies.
Intended to serve as a learning- and sharing environment in which practitioners across departments meet to try out, play with and re-imagine embodied tools, exercises and methodologies for their own practice, it does so by creating encounters with choreographic practices: each toitoitoi event centers around a different form from the performing arts. A practitioner is invited to present their work with the intention of having it leak into the attendee’s works. This leaking and merging is achieved through transmediation, a dynamic and interconnected approach to storytelling or artistic expression in which attendees will first experience a movement practice and are then instructed to apply its peculiarities to their own respective practice.
The three of us created the collective at the start of last year with the aim of establishing communal spaces for listening within our educational institution, bringing together students, teachers, and staff outside of our department’s structure.
Our reflections were stimulated by the work of Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016), a queer Tejana and pioneering composer. Her concept of Quantum Listening and the idea of Deep Listening serve as the foundation for a transformative society. Her work is profoundly intersectional, feminist, and politically engaged, urging us to train our listening to detect the imbalances and injustices of the world.
Our approach to this practice is still guided by questions rather than definitive answers: