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.

Since 2014 Studium Generale teams up with Rietveld Uncut; departments and individual students develop projects in relation to the theoretical framework of Studium Generale. The presentation and exhibition of these programmes is simultaneous to the conference, bringing ‘the making and the thinking’ together.

To programme

2012 – 2013
WHERE ARE WE GOING, WALT WHITMAN?  — An ecosophical roadmap 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’.

With: Nishant Shah, João Florêncio, Marius de Geus, TJ Demos, Diedrich Diederichsen, Erich Hörl, Armin Linke, The Otolith Group, Angela Melitopoulos, Ei Awakara, Binna Choi, Bracha Ettinger, Sabu Kohso, Stefan Tcherepnin, Natasha Ginwala, Rosalind Morris, Olof Olsson, Ayreen Anastas, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Vinciane Despret, Rene Gabri, Fernando García-Dory, Marcos Lutyens, and many more.

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