March 24–27, 2021
studio Generale & Rietveld Uncut present a four-day conference-festival turned into a live-broadcast from Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam & online exhibition of student works.
March 25
CPR (Charlotte Rooijackers): Booty
Booty: valuable stolen goods, especially those seized in war.
Booty: someone’s bottom.
Origin: Probably an alteration of body.
Booty, coercively expropriated goods, often in colonial and/or imperialist warfare, have il/legally shown up in y/our public museums and / as private collections of geopolitical artefacts for centuries. How to recover from stolen, lost, and forgotten heritage? Faced with epistemic violence—the selective acknowledgment of what counts as knowledge production—we may need to un/learn how to read, reconnecting to the archaist meaning of reading: to collect and gather from leftover margins, in an invitation to show and share hands, heads, faces, tongues and spirit/s, toward a reconfiguration of a historical present.
With: Arahmaiani Feisal, Aude Mgba, Lifepatch, Nur’Ain, Stephanie Welvaart.
March 25
Ioanna Gerakidi: it’s a mutant space
“You can only speak nearby, in proximity, which requires that you deliberately suspend meaning, preventing it from merely closing and hence, leaving a gap for formation processes.” –Trinh T. Minh-ha
it’s a mutant space brings together thinkers, artists, and writers who look at exactly these unsettled, fiercely boundless, and untamed spaces in-between formations of meaning. What does it take to inhabit continuing mutations, malformations, physical and mental dislocations? What can mutations be used for—as a means for slinking through darkness and light, whispering and yelling, sweating and shivering, as strategies to escape normativity? How can fictions, auto- and anti-ethnographies, oral histories, and distorted documentation, operate as sites of resistance, and preludes for reaching currents that have not yet been mapped?
Through the practices of the contributors, we will think across itinerant trajectories, vexed times, embodied knowledge, scars, and raptures. Lingering on untamed archives and moving images, timidly spoken words, and rearranged historical narratives, these filmic, textual, and sound acts aim at becoming a prelude and a parable for surviving reality in the making.
With: Daniel Giles, Bill Kouligas, Counter Encounters (Laura Huertas Millán, Onyeka Igwe, Rachael Rakes).
March 26
Jay Tan: Response-able Re-membering
The hyphenation to shift the stress of response-able in The Faggots & Their Friends… was a big deal for me. This afternoon is linked to a reading group where we’ve been looking at various texts, pictures, and drawings as bodily extensions that shift the stresses. Writers and artists that take familiar architectures, (arbitrary) rules, garments, and objects to demonstrate how malleable and expansive our surroundings already are. Making astute social observations, framing beauty, and re-claiming histories, so we re-member (all the parts of) ourselves. Let’s cite historic resource controls and exploitations as amongst the reasons why we would need to write and make pictures to re-member. Economic pushes, educational pulls. Oceans, lies, thefts, and then to top it all off being gawped at. The load redistributes and the aunties and our other families laugh so much, and slap our backs, and push us back out there into more stories. Noisy recipes full of those unspeakable things, teary squishy embraces, jewellery, and fabrics. We re-member how (many) we are and how (many) we have been.
Please join us in welcoming Alberto García del Castillo, Vava Dudu, and Bishakh Som to share their thoughts, pictures, and work.
March 27
Taka Taka: Re-ORGANice our bodies!
A day on AIDS / HIV and PrEP activism and their bicultural intersections through a lens of dragtivism.
Streets are never dead. Maybe they’re empty from time to time, but streets cannot die. Streets can be read as a diary for action by the oppressed, underrepresented, criminalized, but remarkably resilient different bodies—they that hold histories of these actions within them. How to reorganize y/our streets? If the capitalist state can be read as a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behavior; we can destroy it by contracting other relationships, simply by behaving differently.
Today brings together friends, whose emergencies have empowered me, who gave me wisdom and allowed me to reconsider my privilege and what to do with it. My dragmother, PrEP activist and sex-positive night club owner Jennifer Hopelezz; AIDS/HIV activist and graphic designer Stefan Silvestri; and bicultural LGBTQIA+/Trans lobbyist-jurist, and sex work activist Dinah de Riquet-Bons will all share some of their knowledges, experiences, and methods of work(ing). Along with my drag kids, who I greatly miss, and this group of students that stick together to explore more and lesser grotesque forms of masquerades for social impact.
When the streets are active again you may take a moment and think with us: How can we experience these streets differently? How can we utilize these streets as a platform, to transform their content for our bodies’ sake?
Rietveld Uncut is an annual presentation revealing the process of making within the academy to the outside world.
Studium Generale Rietveld Academie is an exploratory theory program aimed at all departments, open to the public.