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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
A new edition of Studium Generale will start in January '23.
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.
Frans Hals Museum & Studium Generale Rietveld Academie present:
The Art of Critique
v^√√v^──√v^√v^──√v^√√v^──What does institutional critique mean today?
14:00-16:00 @ https://studiumgenerale.rietveldacademie.nl/
How can we liquefy our ways of being? How can we think from and with the ocean?
studio Generale Rietveld Academie 2020–2021
Resilient Bodies
Strategies and Practices for Fluid Embodiments
Conference-festival
14:00-15:30
"Let’s hold each other until it’s all over" – Shan Kelley*
2:00–3:30PM
Wednesday February 10, 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM
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)
20 Jan, Karen Archey (lecture)
After Institutions: Care and Change in Times of Crisis
13 Jan Taka Taka (virtual presentation)
Cybernetics - on social practice (AIDS/HIV) : ACT UP
2:00 PM – 3:30 PM, Rietveld’s Gym (and live-streamed on the website)
7 walks with Nikos Doulos
#1 28 Oct
5:00–6:30PM Outdoor
8 writing workshops with y/our lexicon writer CPR (Charlotte Rooijackers)
#1 28 Oct
5:00–6:30PM Fedlev Auditorium
14:00-15:30 at the Gym and live-streamed
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.
8 reading groups with Jay Tan
#1 21 Oct
5:00–6:30PM Library
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.
4 introductory seminars with Giulia Crispiani
#1 21 Oct
5:00–6:30PM online
14:00-15:30 at the Gym and live-streamed
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:
Date: Wednesday 11 March
Time: 13.30 - 18.00
Location: Gym, Rietveld Building
Date: Wednesday 5 March
Time: 13.30 - 18.00
Location: Gym, Rietveld Building
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.
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)
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
4-day CONFERENCE FROM MARCH 19th - 23rd at The Brakke Grond in Amsterdam
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'.
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?
Gerrit Rietveld Academie
Jorinde Seijdel
Jort van der Laan
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'.
Preliminary lecture/workshop/reading group programme + conference-festival including lectures, talks, readings, screenings, presentations, workshops & performances
Gym Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and online
Students & faculty at all departments + general public
2000
knowledge, imagination, reflection, discourse, unorthodox, critical, guest curators, academia, decolonisation, eurocentrism, future pedagogy, future philosophy, politics, research, ecology, technology
14:00-15:30
"Let’s hold each other until it’s all over" – Shan Kelley*
Lesbian feminist filmmaker and artist, pioneer of experimental queer cinema, Barbara Hammer (May 15, 1939 - March 16, 2019) made an abundant amount of work throughout her life – from moving image works to performances, installations, photographs, collages, and drawings. Considering how the body (and hers in particular) plays a central role within her practice, such artistic output is demonstrative of her passionate love for living and all its sensuous details, in both art and activism. Since diagnosed with stage III ovarian cancer in 2006 and in the last decade of her life, Hammer’s artistic production and legacy planning was remarkably energetic, intergenerational, and loving. And in the final years of her life, she advocated for the legalization of medical aid in dying in New York (which is still not legal, and currently only legal in nine states of the US), for death by choice and with peace and dignity. In this lecture, Staci Bu Shea shares about planning and care through their experience of being one of many who worked with Hammer at the end of her life and maps a partial artistic and social landscape of collective grief in the unfolding of her death. This presentation is a vignette into processes of end of life planning and the continuation of life after death.
*Shan Kelley for VISUAL AIDS Print+ Projects, text originally from Who Will Hold Us If We Can't Hold Each Other, 2015, photo transfer, oil paint, semen, pubic hair, resin on wood, 5" in. x 7" in. x 3/4" in.
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Staci Bu Shea (1988) is a curator and writer. They focus on aesthetic and poetic practices of social reproduction and care work, as well as its manifestations in interpersonal relationships and daily life, community organizing, and institutional practice. In 2017, Bu Shea co-curated Barbara Hammer: Evidentiary Bodies at Leslie Lohman Museum of Art (NY) with Carmel Curtis. Bu Shea is curator at Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons in Utrecht, and is also an end of life planner and hospice volunteer.
live streamed @ https://studiumgenerale.rietveldacademie.nl/
