Research Cell Materiality
The Materiality Research Group revisits the role of workshops in art and design education, asking how material comes to matter in the face of contemporary social and ecological challenges. Amid climate crises and growing social inequalities, the initiative positions material-based inquiry as a critical area of research in art and design education. By foregrounding the socio-material intricacies of the workshops – understood as sites where infrastructures, materials, tools, and collective practices are closely intertwined, established tropes such as mastery, novelty, and tacit knowledge are being questioned.
Drawing on feminist and posthumanist thought and practice, the group considers the workshops not simply as places for acquiring skills, producing prototypes and products,but as spaces of negotiation and critical discourse, where materials, people, and ecosystems co-shape one another. The evolving collective material practices resist neoliberal tendencies of tech-optimism and economization of education, and instead propose workshops as sites where care, maintenance, and critical forms of collective knowledge production are being developed. By linking situated practices of making to global questions of extraction, waste production, and climate injustices, the group brings together students, teachers, staff members and researchers to develop self-conscious art and design practices attentive to positionality, responsibility, and material agency.
The team
Anja Groten (b. 1983, DE) is a designer, researcher and organiser based in Amsterdam. Groten holds a degree in Communication Design from Niederrhein University of Applied Science, Krefeld and a Master degree in Design from Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam. Groten’s work revolves around the cross-section of digital and physical media, design education and the involvement in different interdisciplinary collectives. In 2013 Groten co-founded the initiative Hackers & Designers (H&D), attempting to break down the barriers between the two fields by enforcing a common vocabulary through education, hacks and collaboration.
Groten heads the Design Master program of the Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam, Master of the Rietveld Academie and supervises PhD candidates in Artistic and Design Research at the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University. In November 2022 Anja completed a PhD on collective material practices, which was developed as part of the NWO-funded research consortium “Bridging Art Design and Technology Through Critical Making.” The research resulted in two symposia, the dissertation "Figuring Things Out Together. On the Relationship Between Design and Collective Practice" (PhD. Diss, Leiden University, 2022) and a publication titled Making Matters. A Vocabulary of Collective Arts (eds J. Wesseling, Florian Cramer, Valiz, 2022). Groten's current research reconsiders material-based research and knowledge sharing by moving away from the view of skilled practice as a solitary effort to seeing research through making as a collective and interconnected experience. Drawing on trans*feminist hacking principles and critical making, Anja's research aims to make tangible and reimagine digital materiality while resisting extractive tendencies. Promoting regenerative design principles, she addresses the environmental and social impact of digital technologies and resource depletion, emphasizing art and design’s role in tackling these challenges. She argues for an intersectional approach to such challenges, which requires collective and interdisciplinary approaches to design and art making, that are yet to be fostered conceptually and practically within the creative industries and educational institutions.
Márk Redele is project coordinator at Sandberg Research where they contribute to the development and operation of postgraduate research activities in the academy. They studied architecture in their origin country, Hungary, and received a master's degree from Studio for Immediate Spaces in 2016. Since then, they have been a practicing artist pursuing self-initiated and commission-based works with a strong emphasis on material discovery. In their practice materials become the protagonists of stories personal and public, factual and fictive. These stories interrogate the subversive potential of simple material qualities such as porosity, softness and fluidity as well as the possibility of kinship, love and reconciliation in vibrant matter, under repressive conditions.
Website & contact
For more information about our research activities at Rietveld Sandberg Research please visit our website research.rietveldsandberg.nl or contact the Research Bureau: researchsupport[at]rietveldacademie.nl.
