Refuge—fleeing, flowing, leaking

Studium Generale & Rietveld Uncut present a four-day conference festival and exhibition of student works at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam: Refuge—fleeing, flowing, leaking.

How can we harbour and connect bodies and create refuges for affective and dissident voices? With four guest curators, the phenomenon of refuge is considered not only as a concrete and physical construction in a violent or toxic reality, but also as a potential affective space or a caring body. It looks at how restrictive systems (ideologies, states, institutions, academies, machines…) flow and leak unpredictably, from which escape lines can emerge.

March 22
Erika Sprey: “Collective Dream Weavers”
On the first day we reclaim our dream space as a legitimate and transformative form of knowledge (saber) and a life and death necessity. Can our bodyminds, so permeated by colony and capital, still be ‘touched by the gods’ in what is probably one of our last inner refuges: the dream? How can we become more sensitive to how our most intimate, collective and even planetary matters of care are revealed through them? This programme is also part of a longer inquiry into how dreams can be a way of communicating with the more-than-human world that also knows how to dream. With: Tricia Hersey (The Nap Ministry), Camille Barton, Daniel Godínez Nivón, Mala Kline, Marcos Lutyens and Viktorija Rybakova, Laryssa Kim.

March 23
DAAR (Sandi Hilal & Alessandro Petti): “Permanent Temporariness”
Refuge is a temporary state caused by wars, climate change and social, economic and political crises. But what happens when a temporary situation becomes permanent? In recent years, the Permanent Temporariness condition imposed on refugees forced to live in refugee camps has spread to underprivileged sections of society, from precarious workers to immigrants and students. Reflecting on the displacement of Palestinian refugees and the plight of illegalized migrants in Europe, DAAR and their guests will speculate on how to act with and against the state of permanent temporariness to challenge the status quo. With: Hayfaa Chalabi, Shafiq Kafar, Sarri Elfaitouri, Sharham Khosravi, Shafiq Omar Kakar.

March 24
Feifei Zhou: “Off-grid: Refuge through escape”
Refuge is where we feel protected and safe. Refuge in the Anthropocene, in the more-than-human world, may look quite different. Industrial capitalism constructs the world in grids. Plantations lie in grid, dividing lands up in blocks of monoculture. Commercial farms crowd livestocks with fences, packing animals into claustrophobic clusters. Indigenous lands are converted into zones for development and experimentation, leaving native communities with nowhere to go. Refuge is somewhere outside that grid. What do we learn from more-than-human narratives of seeking refuge by breaking out of the grid? With: Zahy Tentehar, Sonia Levy, Dele Adeyemo, Tom Svilans, Anna Tsing.

March 25
Nina bell F.: “Nina bell F. House Museum for Gerrit Rietveld Academie:  bricks to build homes for careful archives”
Following Sara Ahmed, the house is like a dwelling, created by citations as bricks and straws for feminist memory. For Nina bell F. House Museum, archival practices are considered as bricks too. As a lighter material like straw, they can be used to make a shelter. In this vulnerable state, it is a space for fostering institutional critique, to nourish relational and commonist aesthesis.This programme investigates the potential of small art organizations and independent cultural spaces as sites to build homes for archives that do not find a home in the established or state based archives. With: Marianna Takou, Ying Qu, Nuraini Juliastuti, Sites of Memory, Jeftha Pattikawa, Leana Boven.

Framework
Studium Generale Rietveld Academie, an exploratory theory program aimed at all departments, open to the public. Head of program: Jorinde Seijdel. Coordinator: Jort van der Laan. Rietveld Uncut, Departments and individual students develop projects in relation to the theoretical frameworks of Studium Generale. Curators: Tarja Szaraniec and Tomas Adolfs.