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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
Yael Davids - A Daily Practice, One is always a Plural

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

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
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
Beamclub: Writing on Water
Wed
17 Jan
— 13 Mar 2024

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.

Jo-Lene Ong is an independent curator working from The Netherlands and Malaysia. She was program advisor for the 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2023). Her long-term research engages with resilience and other possible futures with countercolonial worldviews on territory, time, and community. Jo-Lene teaches at the Rietveld Academie, co-curates the Amsterdam film club Canal++ and is co-initiator of CounterArchive in Malaysia.

Bo Wang is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher based in Amsterdam. Currently, he is a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. Wang’s works have been exhibited internationally, including at the Guggenheim Museum and Museum of Modern Art (New York), Garage Museum (Moscow), International Film Festival Rotterdam, CPH:DOX (Copenhagen), Image Forum Festival (Tokyo), among many other places. His film An Asian Ghost Story won the New Vision Award at CPH:DOX 2023. Bo is also teaching at the Rietveld Academie.

Jan 17

Tellurian Drama (2020), Riar Rizaldi

In Tellurian Drama, archives from colonial West Java collides with personal narratives on the history of technology, nature and colonisation. A shaman’s breath-taking zither performance brings us a moment of clarity.

Riar Rizaldi (Indonesia) is based in Hong Kong and works as an artist and researcher. His main focus is on the relationship between capital and technology, extractivism, and theoretical fiction. Rizaldi has also curated ARKIPEL Jakarta International Documentary Experimental Film Festival − Penal Colony (2017). He is currently a PhD candidate at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. His works have been shown at Locarno Film Festival, the National Gallery of Indonesia and IFFR. Tellurian Drama is his second short film, with its European premiere at IFFR 2021.

Jan 24

Porosity Valley 2: Tricksters’ Plot (2019), Ayoung KIM

Porosity Valley 2:Tricksters’ Plot is a speculative fiction that revolves around the recent arrival of Yemeni refugees in Korea. The event has evoked a nationwide anti-Islamic sentiment and xenophobia, which portray migrants as sorts of malware or viruses that threaten the immune system (this could also be considered a “pure blood mythology”). All of a sudden they have become fictitious.This piece expands upon the previous work through a fictionalized depiction of the migration of the mineral/data cluster known as Petra Genetrix. Juxtaposing refugee migration with data migration, both of which characterize migration in the 21st century, the work creates an imaginary space-time by interrogating the “ways of existence” and the “ways of representation” of the Yemeni refugees who recently arrived in South Korea.

Ayoung KIM (South Korea) is a visual artist and filmmaker. Kim adopts the devices of speculative storytelling to evoke unfamiliar forms of reading, listening and thinking about the conditions of the world by focusing on unlikely encounters of ideas. Her projects take the forms of video, sonic fiction, VR, text, performance and game simulation and are presented as exhibitions, performances and publications. Kim exhibited and screened at Venice Biennale (2015); Palais de Tokyo (2016); Korea Artist Prize (2019); Sharjah Film Platform (2019, 2020); Berlinale (2020); Asian Art Biennial (2021); Videobrasil (2021) and Sharjah Biennial (2023).

Jan 31

Piña Why Is The Sky Blue? (2021), Stephanie Comilang, Simon Speiser
Into the Violet Belly (2022), Thuy Han Nguyen Chi

Piña, Why is the Sky Blue? is an affirming techno-feminist vision of a future in which ancestral knowledge and new technologies converge. This speculative documentary narrates the story of a spiritual medium known as Piña. As a form of artificial intelligence, Piña is able to receive and collect inherited knowledge, messages, and dreams from people around the world in order to secure their survival.Piña, Why is the Sky Blue? features footage shot in the Philippines and Ecuador, where Comilang and Speiser, respectively, have family histories. Its video component includes interviews with activists and healers from local organizations such as the Indigenous feminist collective Cyber Amazonas in Puyo, and Las Martinas de Piedras Negras in Quito, both in Ecuador; as well as with a shaman or Babaylan, in Palawan, Philippines.

Stephanie Comilang is an artist living and working between Toronto and Berlin. Her documentary based works create narratives that look at how our understandings of mobility, capital and labour on a global scale are shaped through various cultural and social factors. Her work has been shown at Transmediale Berlin, Ghost:2561 Bangkok Video & Performance Triennale, Hamburger Bahnhof, Tai Kwun Hong Kong, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Asia Art Archive in America, New York. She was awarded the 2019 Sobey Art Award, Canada’s most prestigious art prize for artists 40 years and younger.
Simon Speiser is an artist who conjures fictional concepts that merge nature with technology. Placing a variety of media and disciplines in dialogue with one another—ranging from writing, sculpture, and printing to video and VR installations—Speiser’s work expands the possibilities between art and science fiction. He has exhibited at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, MMK Frankfurt, CAC Quito, Oracle Berlin, Croy Nielsen, MMCA Seoul, and Robert Grunenberg Berlin, among others.

Into the Violet Belly interweaves the story of the artist's mother fleeing Vietname as a refugee during the war with myth and science fiction.

Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi is a Berlin- and London-based artist whose practice mutates in and out of sculpture, installation, moving image and interdisciplinary research. Her work explores imaginations of freedom at the intersection of film-making and film theory, critical refugee studies and postcolonial studies, personal/prosthetic memory and individual/collective histories.
Nguyen-Chi studied Fine Arts at Städelschule (2010-2015) and Film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2017-2019). Currently, she is pursuing PhD research in Film at CREAM, the University of Westminster

Feb 7

Core Dump (2019), Francoise Knoetze

Core Dump consists of 4 short films: Kinshasa (2018), Shenzhen (2019), New York (2019) and Dakar (2018), and explores the relationship between digital technology, cybernetics, colonialism and the reenchanted notion of a Non-Aligned Humanist Utopia.

Francois Knoetze is a scavenger, sculptor, performer, and video artist with an interest in the connections between social histories and material culture. His roaming costumed performances and experimental videos pick at the socio-spatial force-fields that attempt to rigidly order the contaminated, folded, and entangled worlds of people and things. His videos create narrative portraits of the uncertainty in the nervous system of a global digital machine at the brink of collapse. Knoetze is a co-founder of the Lo-Def Film Factory and is based in South Africa.

Feb 14

Last Things (2023), Deborah Stratman

Last Things unfolds along a science-fictional / science-factual spine. Evolution and extinction from the point of view of rocks and various future others. The project originated from two novellas of J.-H. Rosny, the joint pseudonym of the Belgian brothers Boex who wrote on natural, prehistoric and speculative subjects—sci fi before it was a genre. The film takes up their pluralist vision of evolution, where imagining prehistory is inseparable from envisioning the future. Also central are Hazel Barton’s research on cave microbes and Marcia Bjørnerud’s thoughts on time literacy.

Deborah Stratman is a Chicago-based artist and filmmaker who explores landscapes and systems. She’s exhibited internationally at venues including MoMA (NY), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Hammer Museum (LA), Witte de With (Rotterdam), PS1 (NY), Tabakalera (San Sebastian), Austrian Film Museum (Vienna), Yerba Buena Center (SF), and Whitney Biennial (NY).Stratman’s films have been featured widely at festivals and conferences including Sundance, Viennale, Berlinale, CPH:DOX, Oberhausen, True/False, TIFF, Locarno, Rotterdam, the Flaherty and Docs Kingdom.

Feb 28

Heat Waves (2022), Kent Chan
Club Ate (2015), Ex Nilalang: Balud, Dysebel, Lolo Ex Machina
Heat Waves (2022), Kent Chan

Heat Waves examines the contexts, politics, and proliferation of different aesthetics of heat. Aesthetics that stems from regions of the globe coloured by their solar relations bestowing heat in abundance. Aesthetics that are oft generalised - charged with vibrancy, vitality, and visual complexity - that are increasingly mined at a time when the earth is simultaneously warming.

Kent Chan is an artist, curator and filmmaker based in Netherlands and Singapore. He holds particular interest in the tropical imaginary, the past and future relationships between heat and art, and contestations to the legacies of modernity as the epistemology par excellence. Recently he was a resident of Gasworks (2022), Medialab Matadero (2022), Jan van Eyck Academie (2019/20), NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (2017/18). He has held solo and two-person presentations at Gasworks, Kunstinstituut Melly, Bonnefanten Museum, National University Singapore Museum, and de Appel.|

Ex Nilalang consists a series of work by the artist collective Club Ate and uses myth as a form to explore the intersections of queer identities of the Filipino diaspora.

Club Até is an art collective based on the unceded lands of Sydney, led by interdisciplinary performance artists Justin Shoulder and Bhenji Ra. They frequently collaborate with associate artists: Matthew Stegh, set and costume designer; Tristan Jalleh, digital video artist and music video director; and Corin Ileto, composer and electronic music producer, as well as their LGBQTIA+ artistic community. The work of Club Até is informed by the artists shared Filipino / Australian ancestry and the collective is invested in creating their own Future Folklore.

Mar 6

Constant (2022), Beny Wagner & Livintseva

Constant is a journey through the social and political histories of measurement. The film explores three shifts in the history of measurement standardization, from the land surveying that drove Early Modern European land privatization, to the French Revolution that drove the Metric Revolution, to the conceptual dematerialisation of measurement in the contemporary era of Big Science. Each chapter traces the relationship of measurement standardization to ideas of egalitarianism, agency, justice, and power.” (Sasha Litvintseva & Beny Wagner)

Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner are artists, filmmakers and writers. They’ve been working collaboratively since 2018. Focusing on moving image as a tool for the active production of new worlds, their practice has been driven by questions about the thresholds between the body and its surroundings, knowledge regimes and power, modes of organising and perceiving the natural world. Their collaborative work has been presented globally, including at the Berlinale, Rotterdam, and CPH:DOX. Their films have won numerous awards including the Silvestre Best Short Film at IndieLisboa and Best Short Documentary at Guanajuato Film Festival. They are the authors of All Thoughts Fly: Monster, Taxonomy, Film (Sonic Acts Press: 2021).

Mar 13

Ningwasum (2021), Subash Thebe Limbu

Set in an Indigenous Yakthung nation in Nepal, Ningwasum follows two time-travellers, Miksam and Mingsoma, who return to the present from a future where interplanetary civilisations are thriving and living sustainably by adopting Indigenous knowledge and technology. The fragility of our current ecosystem is portrayed in aerial shots and documentary footage of Himalayan glaciers, imbued with an ethereal blue filter. These are woven with digital cosmic landscapes and an immersive soundtrack, which includes electronic sound, spoken word, and folksongs. Ningwasum – which loosely translates as ‘memory’ in Yakthungpan – explores notions of time, memory and space, and how these shape reality.

Subash Thebe Limbu is a Yakthung (Limbu) artist from Yakthung Nation (Limbuwan) from what we currently know as eastern nepal. He works with sound, film, music, performance, painting and podcast. His Yakthung name is ᤋᤠᤱᤛᤠᤱ Tangsang (Sky). Subash has MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins (2016), BA in Fine Art from Middlesex University (2011), and Intermediate in Fine Art from Lalit Kala Campus, Kathmandu. His works are inspired by socio-political issues, resistance and science/speculative fiction. Migration, climate change, and indigeneity or Adivasi Futurism as he calls it, are recurring themes in his works.

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