CANCELED: STUDIUM GENERALE RIETVELD ACADEMIE

About Rietveld Uncut

Rietveld Uncut is one of the three annual presentation moments of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie since 2009. Rietveld Uncut has been collaborating with Studium Generale Rietveld Academie since 2014; departments and individual students develop projects in relation to the theoretical frameworks of Studium Generale Rietveld Academie.

Within Rietveld Uncut, the process of creating work, contact with the public outside the academy and the relationship to Studium Generale's subjects that change every year play a substantive role.

This collaboration leads to a simultaneous conference week and exhibition, where making and thinking come together.

Studium Generale Rietveld 2019—2020 focuses on histories, politics, and perceptions of colour in the creation and understanding aesthetic forms, social structures, and embodied experiences. Colour structures our daily life and our actions, our relationships with others and the spaces in which we live. Within different historical and cultural contexts, however, colours have very different symbolic, psychological, material, and socio-political meanings. Relating (to) Colour wants to see colour in art, science, technology, and life beyond the purely symbolic and aesthetic and not as self-evident or universal, but as a physical, material, cultural, and political phenomenon. We try to understand colour not only as visual, sensual, or textual but especially as a lived experience and relational concept that creates affect and agency.

Guest curators: Stefano Harney, Patricia Pisters, Ola Hassanain & Casco Art Institute, Taka Taka.

DAY 1: STEFANO HARNEY

March 25

Stefano Harney is the co-author with Fred Moten of The Undercommons: fugitive planning and black study (2013) and the forthcoming All Incomplete (2020), both from Autonomedia/Minor Compositions. He is Honorary Professor at The Institute of Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia and a Visiting Critic at Yale School of Art. Together with Tonika Sealy Thompson he runs Ground Provisions, a reading residency. He is also co-founder of School for Study, a collective of teachers in higher education experimenting with ensemble teaching. Stefano has held teaching positions in New York, Leicester, London, and Singapore. He holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and an AB from Harvard University.
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DAY 2: PATRICIA PISTERS

March 26

Patricia Pisters is a writer and researcher and professor of film and media culture at the University of Amsterdam where she teaches critical media theory and film-philosophy . Her work focuses on the transforming relations between body, brain, and aesthetics in transnational film, media, and culture. She has curated several conferences and events that combine academic and artistic approaches including and Geomediations (University of Amsterdam/Arizona State University/Mediamatic, 2018; Give me a Brain! (Rietveld Studium Generale, 2011); Worlding the Brain (Stedelijk Statements, 2017); Cinema Olanda: Black Figures, Black Voices (Witte de With, 2017); and the International Deleuze Studies Conference Connect, Continue, Create, which included the exhibition The Smooth and the Striated (University of Amsterdam/Huize Frankendael/Nieuw Dakota, 2010). In 2019 she was scholar in residence at EYE Filmmuseum and fellow at Cinepoetics Centre for Advanced Film Studies at the Free University of Berlin. Her publications include Filming for the Future (2016), The Neuro-Image (2012), and The Matrix of Visual Culture (2003). Her latest book New Blood in Contemporary Cinema: Women Directors and the Poetics of Horror appears in 2020 with Edinburgh University Press.
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DAY 3: OLA HASSANAIN & CASCO ART INSTITUTE (with Nina bell F.)

March 27

Ola Hassanain
Since early on in her architectural career, Ola Hassanain has utilized a growing sense of frustration over the gulf between academia’s architectural theory and real-world actualities of the built environment. As she pursued advanced degrees, she trained her focus on the subtle politics of space – namely, the ways built spaces react to and reinforce violence against certain bodies in space. Her interests centre around public space, public policy, and government regulation. When her family was forced out of Sudan by crisis-fuelled diaspora, her fascination with the relationship between architecture and the landscape, territories, and ways the built environment reflects, responds to, and shapes the lives of those who inhabit it, increased. Her most recent work explores the idea of ‘space as discourse’ – a launch point for discussions around an expanded sense of space, encompassing the influence of politics and the environmental needs of citizens.

Nina bell F. / Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons
Nina bell F. are many with multiple heads, hearts, and bodies, made up of those who are in, with and beyond Casco Art Institute in the front and in the back, near and far, past and future. Therefore, Nina’s pronouns are she/they. They are a constellation connected but also under and outside this organization. As a feminist figuration, Nina works towards the institution’s most radical, collective imagination. Better than us all even when combined as a team, Nina are an ethical entity to live up to, and at the very least, a proposition. The collective figure of Nina bell Federici (Nina bell F.) stems from the shared admiration for the artistic, Black, feminist, and political engagements of Nina Simone, bell hooks, and Silvia Federici. Nina emerged in the context of the Site for Unlearning (Art Organisation) project convened by the Casco team and artist Annette Krauss, and, among others, lives on through the study line at Casco, which questions social norms and structures and takes on the process of unlearning oppressive institutional habits for a more commoning practice. Nina bell F. challenge the team to think beyond (institutional) frameworks of Casco and artist, and inspire work towards relationalities that support the fight against social injustices in the here and now. On this occasion, Nina is represented by Binna Choi (director Casco Art Institute, Utrecht), Annette Krauss (artist and course leader, MA Fine Art, HKU, Utrecht), Yolande van der Heide (exhibition curator, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven), and Ying Que (anthropologist and freelancer, Utrecht).
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DAY 4: TAKA TAKA

March 28

Taka Taka identifies as a professional drag-thing who functions as art director for the House of Hopelezz. He organizes weekly queer parties at cruise Club Church and para-educational strategies for the marginal LGBTQI+ community, including political and gender asylum seekers, friends with the virus, misfits, and party monsters. Taka Taka is a sister for others, a mother of few, and the daughter of Jennifer Hopelezz. Taka Taka is a graduate of the Dutch Art Institute (2017) with a clear interest in Dragtivism as social practice. In 2019 they launched the non-profit Drag king Academy Amsterdam, which resulted in the creation of the first drag king house of Amsterdam, House of Løstbois.
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