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Studium Generale

In the belief that art students can only learn to think independently when knowledge, imagination and reflection combine to work together in an unorthodox and critical way, Studium Generale Rietveld aims to encourage critical forms of learning, making and thinking. It follows a new research trajectory every year around a specific theme that links up with current events, issues and discussions in the (art) world. Artists and theoreticians from home and abroad offer a broad spectrum of perspectives on the overarching themes with lectures, performances, presentations and screenings.

After a preliminary programme, which also includes film screenings, reading groups, workshops and publications, there is an annual four-day conference festival in collaboration with guest curators who make contact with urgent critical discourses from different perspectives and practices. This takes place at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and is open to the public.

Past
Studium Generale
Wed
31 Jan
2024
Digital Witchcraft: Religious Studies in Cybernetic Contexts, by Danae Tapia

Through a revision of the work of The Digital Witchcraft Institute we will cover a comparative analysis between tech and the supernatural, the use of the digital realm as a spiritual facilitator, and magic as a design methodology. This trajectory will allow us to evaluate the possibilities for mystical and religious technologies in the 21st century.

Studium Generale
Wed
24 Jan
2024
A Story to Tell – Voice and Authorship in the Age of AI

Workshop series led by Mariana Fernández Mora:
In the age of AI, how does the concept of “voice” start to be reshaped by generative technologies like ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion or MidJourney?

Studium Generale
Wed
17 Jan
2024
A Soft Focus for Breathing Machines: reading group moderated by Jay Tan

Me and my closest far away friend were messaging about who sees who. We wonder about witch-hunty-ness; cutting to expose, separate and name the non-conforming. Hoist it up above the surface into known form. Let’s see everything clearly. The ciliary muscles contract and the lens fattens. And what about those who "turn a blind eye", or "look through their fingers"? Things could happen so long as we don’t articulate too much in the open, don’t pull focus. Here things are underneath, still violent but maybe brooding with possibility.

Studium Generale
Wed
17 Jan
2024
Technodiversity, GHOST, Post-signature

Introduction to Stadium Generale '23/'24 “Technodiversity”, Rietveld Uncut, website launch, Techno Spectres talk & lecture-performance:

January 17
14:00-15:30
@ Rietveld’d GYM

Studium Generale
Wed
17 Jan
2024
Beamclub: Writing on Water

Writing on Water is a program of artists' films exploring the technological as ecological. The films examine the planetary costs of technology beholden industry and proposes revolutionary categories towards a more elemental technology that consider the life and logics of minerals, plants, animals, and future ancestors.
Curated & hosted by Jo-Lene Ong with Bo Wang.

Beamclub takes place in the Theory Stairs of the FedLev building.

Studium Generale
Wed
18 Jan
2023
Refuge – fleeing, flowing, leaking

Human and non-human animals seek refuge because of war, terror, hunger, exploitation, climate change, or through structural forms of everyday oppression and exclusion. You find refuge in a camp, bomb shelter, safe space, in a body, state of being, state of mind. Or you refuge in a (self-chosen) family, community, movement, or collectivity.

Studium Generale
Wed
18 Jan
2023
Studium Generale 2023: Refuge – fleeing, flowing, leaking

A new edition of Studium Generale will start in January '23.

Studium Generale
Wed
11 May
2022
D’Ette Nogle, FKA: A MESSAGE FROM THE ARTIST

Frans Hals Museum & Studium Generale Rietveld Academie present:

The Art of Critique
v^√√v^──√v^√v^──√v^√√v^──What does institutional critique mean today?

Studium Generale
Wed
19 Jan
2022
Forensic Oceanography & What is it like to be an eel?

14:00-16:00 @ https://studiumgenerale.rietveldacademie.nl/

Studium Generale
Wed
27 Oct
2021
Oceanic Imaginaries

How can we liquefy our ways of being? How can we think from and with the ocean?

Studium Generale
Wed
24 Mar
2021
RESILIENT BODIES - STRATEGIES AND PRACTICES FOR FLUID EMBODIMENTS

studio Generale Rietveld Academie 2020–2021

Resilient Bodies
Strategies and Practices for Fluid Embodiments


Conference-festival

Studium Generale
Wed
17 Mar
2021
Dying Livingly (with Barbara Hammer)

14:00-15:30

"Let’s hold each other until it’s all over" – Shan Kelley*

Studium Generale
Wed
17 Feb
2021
Nadia de Vries, The Responsibility of Having (Seeing, Being) a Body

2:00–3:30PM

Studium Generale
Wed
10 Feb
2021
WALKING HOME: Spectral perambulations at nighttime

Wednesday February 10, 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Studium Generale
Fri
29 Jan
2021
Reclaiming Y/Our Non? human Waterbodies - A lexicon without a clearly defined shape

2021 Studium Generale Lexicon
Reclaiming Y/Our Non? human Waterbodies
written by CPR (Charlotte Rooijackers) and designed by Pernille Knudsgaard, Dongseok Min, Eleanor Schilling (under supervision of David Bennewith)

Studium Generale
Wed
20 Jan
2021
Karen Archey, After Institutions: Care and Change in Times of Crisis

20 Jan, Karen Archey (lecture)
After Institutions: Care and Change in Times of Crisis

Studium Generale
Wed
13 Jan
2021
ACT UP : Taka Taka, Cybernetics - on social practice (AIDS/HIV)

13 Jan Taka Taka (virtual presentation)
Cybernetics - on social practice (AIDS/HIV) : ACT UP

Studium Generale
Wed
18 Nov
2020
LECTURE: Naomie Pieter, My response to racism is anger: Transforming rage into power

2:00 PM – 3:30 PM, Rietveld’s Gym (and live-streamed on the website)

Studium Generale
Wed
28 Oct
2020
Re-ORGANice our bodies! WORKSHOP /w Taka Taka

Dragtivist 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.

Studium Generale
Wed
28 Oct
2020
What We Walk About When We Talk About Walking WALKING CLUB /w Nikos Doulos

7 walks with Nikos Doulos
#1 28 Oct
5:00–6:30PM Outdoor

Studium Generale
Wed
28 Oct
2020
Ecopoetics! Spirits and their human horses WRITING WORKSHOP /w CPR

8 writing workshops with y/our lexicon writer CPR (Charlotte Rooijackers)
#1 28 Oct
5:00–6:30PM Fedlev Auditorium

Studium Generale
Wed
28 Oct
2020
Yael Davids - A Daily Practice, One is always a Plural

14:00-15:30 at the Gym and live-streamed

Studium Generale
Wed
21 Oct
2020
Response-able Re-membering READING GROUP /w Jay Tan

8 reading groups with Jay Tan
#1 21 Oct
5:00–6:30PM Library

Studium Generale
Wed
21 Oct
2020
ruins are relics READING GROUP /w Ioanna Gerakidi

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.

Studium Generale
Wed
21 Oct
2020
Embodied crash course SEMINAR /w Giulia Crispiani

4 introductory seminars with Giulia Crispiani
#1 21 Oct
5:00–6:30PM online

Studium Generale
Wed
23 Sep
2020
Quinsy Gario - To reparatively remember: On 'We offered Maurice dates, grasshoppers and water'

14:00-15:30 at the Gym and live-streamed

Studium Generale
Fri
19 Jun
2020
A Manual Off Colour > How Do We Party Each Other

Originally a character construction-study hosted by drag thing Taka Taka during Studium Generale 2020, the workshop students were expected to be able to generate a character and complete a 3-minute performance to be presented in a final public moment, ie at the Stedelijk Museum in spring of 2020. However, due to the migration of Rietveld UNCUT into to the digital realm, Taka Taka and founding students Aurélia Noudelmann, Papa Yorick, Mingrui Jiang, Ana Resende, Ingeborg Kraft Fermin, Julius Stahlie, Dariya Trubina, turned the cancelation of Relating Colour to Partying: How Do We Party Each Other? For Studium Generale Rietveld Academie at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam into a new online queer notebook and public platform of interdepartmental exchange:

Studium Generale
Wed
11 Mar
2020
Lecture by Isabel Cordeiro & Joke Robaard

Date: Wednesday 11 March
Time: 13.30 - 18.00
Location: Gym, Rietveld Building

Studium Generale
Wed
4 Mar
2020
Lecture by Patricia Pisters

Date: Wednesday 5 March
Time: 13.30 - 18.00
Location: Gym, Rietveld Building

Studium Generale
Wed
21 Mar
2018
Hold Me Now | Conference-Festival & Exhibition

Studium Generale Rietveld Academie and Rietveld Uncut collaborate on an extensive, artistic research trajectory in a four-day conference-festival curated by Karen Archey, Mark Paterson, Rizvana Bradley and Jack Halberstam and exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

Studium Generale
Wed
13 Jan
2016
bots, bodies, beasts

What does it mean for art making if the “human” is but one life form among many? By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. This cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. (from Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, 1983) In the similarity of clowns to animals the likeness of humans to apes flashes up: the constellation animal/fool/clown is a fundamental layer of art. (Theodor W. Adorno quoted by Anselm Franke in Ape Culture, 2015)

Studium Generale
Mon
16 Mar
2015
ARE YOU ALIVE OR NOT? Looking at ART through the lens of THEATRE

action, actor, affect, alienation, altar, arena, audience, body, dance, effect, emancipation, event, carnival, class, collaboration, collective, costume, cruelty, desire, director, gesture, happening, idea, image, intervention, magic circle, mass, masquerade, mediation, movement, moving image, mystery, participation, performance, play-ground, power, practice, presence, process, protest, puppet, re-enactment, relation, screen, situation, social, space, spectacle, spectator, stage, staging, state, subversion, temple, text, theatricality, time, voice, zombie

Studium Generale
Wed
19 Mar
2014
VOICE ~ CREATURE OF TRANSITION

4-day CONFERENCE FROM MARCH 19th - 23rd at The Brakke Grond in Amsterdam

Studium Generale
Wed
14 Nov
2012
WHERE ARE WE GOING, WALT WHITMAN? An ecosophical roadman for artists and other futurists

By exploring the potentialities of ecological worldviews, old and new, through theory and art, WHERE ARE WE GOING, WALT WHITMAN? seeks to accelerate, accumulate, animate and activate our poetical and political understanding of the world. The project will not map a North, South, East, West. No upside, no downside, no center, no periphery, no order, no border. It rather reveals a meshwork of criss-cross paths, rhythms, and flows. It wants to be a guide for self-learners wishing to think freely and critically about and through art and 'a thousand ecologies'.

Studium Generale
Thu
1 Dec
2011
WE ARE THE TIME: Art Lives in the Age of Global Transition

Drawing inspiration from The Role of a Lifetime (2003), by artist and filmmaker Deimantas Narkevičius WE ARE THE TIME explores the role of lifetime and life experience as a crucial source of ideas and inspirations, as a force that shapes ones’ art practice. Life experience is always generated as the intersection between the personal rhythm of one’s life and the larger societal perspective. How do we position ourselves in time? What are the decisive moments in our personal lives? What is our relation to the historical moment or context? How do we weave them into our life-narratives?

Founder (person or department)

Gerrit Rietveld Academie

Coordinators/Organizers/Curators

Jorinde Seijdel
Jort van der Laan

Goal

Studium Generale wants to show how art and design are linked with other domains (from the personal to the political, from the vernacular to the academic), how our ‘now' is linked with past and future, our ‘here' with ‘elsewhere'.

Formats

Preliminary lecture/workshop/reading group programme + conference-festival including lectures, talks, readings, screenings, presentations, workshops & performances

Location

Gym Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and online

Target Group

Students & faculty at all departments + general public

Founding year

2000

Further information
Contact
Keywords

knowledge, imagination, reflection, discourse, unorthodox, critical, guest curators, academia, decolonisation, eurocentrism, future pedagogy, future philosophy, politics, research, ecology, technology

← Studium Generale
A Soft Focus for Breathing Machines: reading group moderated by Jay Tan
Wed
17 Jan
— 28 Feb 2024

Me and my closest far away friend were messaging about who sees who. We wonder about witch-hunty-ness; cutting to expose, separate and name the non-conforming. Hoist it up above the surface into known form. Let’s see everything clearly. The ciliary muscles contract and the lens fattens. And what about those who "turn a blind eye", or "look through their fingers"? Things could happen so long as we don’t articulate too much in the open, don’t pull focus. Here things are underneath, still violent but maybe brooding with possibility.

  • January 17, 24, 31; and February 7, 14, 28, from 17:00-18:30
  • at Rietveld/Sandberg Library

I had a moment at the weekend where I consciously gave up on the muscles in my eyes. I was too tired to focus. My body said let go of all this identifying of forms and outlines. I came home and listened to blurry videos of eye surgery. Video. Eyes. Surgery. All technologies? All tissues? I wonder about the divide/relation between apparatuses and substances. The blade/the lens. That which forms, that which is formed. pre-formed, per-formed. I wonder about the surgery before European doctors sensationalised their “repairing of the defects of nature” into theatre.

Bhanu Kapil helps by proposing performance as a diasporic technology. We move. Relations shift. Yuk Hui opens the door to the (mostly) boys club. Come and see… Bergson is worried about the Mechanisation of Spirit, Lyotard is making destabilising shows full of computers in darkened rooms. Are we hypnotised by the “the immaterials”? How did art fair in all of this? Who relates to landscape painting as technology? How, and when, to focus my body as a lens? Maybe more than the visible light spectrum can be focused? Maybe more is held than seen?


Texts and art works by: Lynn Hershman Leeson, Giorgio Agamben, Legacy Russell, Chen Qiufan, Yuk Hui, Jean-François Lyotard, Bhanu Kapil, N.K. Jemisin.

Places are limited and, in principle, your participation concerns the entire series.
Sign up by sending an email before Jan. 16, to: studiumgenerale@rietveldacademie.nl

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