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.

The Responsibility of Having (Seeing, Being) a Body
Nadia de Vries

As artists, writers, and thinkers, we are often encouraged to consider the human body as a type of material: as an object that can be freely regarded, interpreted, adapted, and critiqued. In this capacity, it is easy to overlook the ethical stakes involved with public presentations of the human body. What is more, bodies that are presented as public objects (and therefore as accessible and available objects) are often also bodies that occupy precarious social positions. As artists, writers, and thinkers, then, we have a responsibility towards the bodies we portray, whether that body is our own or someone else’s. In this lecture, Dr. Nadia de Vries will share critical insights from her own research on the presentation and circulation of vulnerable bodies, and offer practical considerations for those interested in, or currently working with the human body as an aesthetic material.

Dr. Nadia de Vries (1991) is a poet and essayist. She is the author of the critical memoir Kleinzeer (Uitgeverij Pluim, 2019; in Dutch) and the poetry collections Dark Hour (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018) and I Failed to Swoon (2021). In 2020, she defended her PhD dissertation titled Digital Corpses: Creation, Appropriation, and Reappropriation, about the online representation of dead and dying human bodies, at the University of Amsterdam.