Life After Rietveld and Sandberg: Money? Money! Money...
Let’s talk about how to price your work and why the system is or isn’t working.
This is an open conversation about something we all deal with in the visual art field but rarely discuss: money. How do you decide what your work is worth? What happens when you start working commercially: do you say yes to everything? And what kind of obstacles do you face when trying to make a living as an artist? Together, we’ll unpack these questions and look at tools like the Fair Practice Code to think through what “fair pay” might look like in the arts today. This is a chance to share experiences, frustrations, and small victories, to talk honestly about what’s working, and what really isn’t.
We’ll explore how to value creative labor, navigate the pressures of the art world, and hopefully imagine more sustainable ways of working.
The session of Life After Rietveld and Sandberg on Thursday 20 November is hosted by Alina Lupu (writer and post-conceptual artist, Fine Arts alum Rietveld Academie 2016). In conversation with two SI alums, Pablo Rezzonico Bongcam and Anto López Espinosa, who will share their experiences and practice with us.
Programme 20 November
17.15: Money? Money! Money... by Alina Lupu
18:45: End of session
Register here!
The session will be held in English at the Theory stairs in the FedLev Building. The space is accessible for wheelchair users. It will not be live-streamed, but a recording will be shared afterwards on the website.
About
Alina Lupu
A Romanian-born, Dutch-based writer and post-conceptual artist. She examines the role that images and performative actions play in standing in solidarity through protest against capitalist hegemony and precarity. Here, protest has a quite broad definition for her: from acts of civil disobedience, to petitions, debates, and building of counter-capitalist structures of care, creating a series of dialogues on alternatives to exploitative systems. She’s a board member of the solidarity organization Platform BK, which works to improve the conditions of artists within the Netherlands.
Pablo Rezzonico Bongcam
Working primarily with appropriated or displaced materials, sampled casts of architectures and fragmented narratives; Pablo Rezzonico Bongcam assembles, alters and combines objects into installations and environments. His works often stem from gleaned traces: remnants whose lost contexts, anecdotal nature, apparent historical irrelevance, stillness or banality, situate on the threshold of silence. Drawing on techniques of reproduction, restoration, mold-making, and imitation, he seeks to question the conflicted and ever-shifting relationships between material remains and the (de-) construction of the past. Central to Rezzonico Bongcam’s practice are concerns around historical discontinuity, fabricated or inherited memory, transformation, displacement and migration, and the role of objects as witnesses to change. He is particularly interested in the erosion or absence of traces, the projection and rewriting of History, vernacular experiences of time and its ruptures, and the opacity resulting from such processes.
Anto López Espinosa
Graduated in 2018 in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths University of London, and obtained in 2020 a Masters diploma on The Commoners’ Society from Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam, city where they currently live. Their practice unfolds through oral performative works. Using lip-syncing as a medium that incorporates sound, poetry, text and music, they explore queer vocal traditions as forms of embodied and archival performance. Their work critically engages with the gaze — both challenging and inviting it— using contemporary storytelling to unravel the poetics of queerness and to foster a collective search for love, and belonging.
Life After Rietveld and Sandberg
Together with the departments, Rietveld and Sandberg organise a series of monthly sessions to prepare students and recent graduates for professional practice after their studies. By inviting both experts and alums, the series aims to give participants a clearer idea of what professional practice they aspire to and what their first steps will be after graduation. The programme is open to Rietveld and Sandberg students as well as alums who have recently (less than 5 years ago) graduated.
This series is initiated and organised by Public & Projects Rietveld Sandberg.