Studium Generale 2024-2025
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Gerrit Rietveld Academie present Radical Accessibility: Crip Pedagogies, Crip Theory, Crip Practice, a multi-day event featuring lectures, presentations, screenings, and performances by international artists, theorists, and Rietveld students. Part of the collaboration is the conference series Studium Generale, which this year explores disability justice and the accessibility of art through a ‘Crip’ perspective.
The annual collaboration between the Stedelijk Museum and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie consists of two parts: a conference, and an exhibition with performance programme, Rietveld Uncut.
Studium Generale is a comprehensive theoretical programme at the Rietveld Academie. The Stedelijk Museum will host a three-day conference where guest curators will each fill a day with diverse artistic perspectives on the theme Radical Accessibility: Crip Pedagogies, Crip Theory, Crip Practice.
Following Studium Generale's theme, students will create new work for the exhibition Rietveld Uncut. The exhibition will be complemented and activated on Friday Night 21 March with a special programme of performances and interventions.
Radical Accessibility: Crip Pedagogies, Crip Theory, Crip Practice
Studium Generale 2024-25 explores the accessibility of art and cultural practices through a ‘Crip’ perspective. This approach emphasizes interdependency, mutual solidarity, and shared responsibility among our diverse bodies and minds. Once a term used negatively to describe people with disabilities, ‘Crip’ has been reclaimed by artists, activists, and scholars as a positive and empowering term, akin to ‘queer.’ It challenges harmful norms and prejudices and examines how disability intersects with gender, race, class, sexuality, and the environment, encouraging us to consider these connections on both personal and political levels.
Despite this, numerous barriers persist in our daily lives and learning environments. Many spaces remain inaccessible due to poor design and a lack of adequate accommodations and tools. Educational materials often marginalize or overlook diverse voices and bodyminds. By working with Crip artists, activists, and thinkers, we aim to reimagine the academy, our community, and our artistic practices through this Crip lens. How can we make accessibility a core aspect of our learning, thinking, and creating, rather than an afterthought or add-on?
Speakers and contributors conference:
Wednesday 19 March: The World is Our Corner: Neurodivergent Homelands and Landscapes – Guest curated by Hamja Ahsan, with Sarah Browne and Ipek Burçak
Hamja Ahsan envisions a transnational liberation movement and utopic homeland of Aspergistan—for neurodivergent, quiet people and introverts—within his book Shy Radicals: Antisystemic Politics of the Militant Introvert. His keynote will explore the expansive practice of Shy Radicals, which extends beyond the book through film, installation, zine archives, and, more broadly, as a decentralized curatorial culture.
He invites İpek Burçak, the first artist to bring the concept of Aspergistan and its coined terms into another space through her risograph book The Autistic Turn and accompanying multidisciplinary practice in sound, publishing, film, and performance.
Joining the conversation, artist Sarah Browne will present her film project Echo Bones: A Parallel Play, which reinterprets Samuel Beckett’s fiction by working with a community of adolescents diagnosed with autistism in Ireland.
These practices speculate on a shared future within real and imagined worldscapes, beyond the pathological, medical, and correctional.
Thursday 20 March: Unsettling Acces: Care, Touch and Institutional Change – Guest curated by Unsettling Rietveld Sandberg, with Judith Leysner, Carolina Calgaro, Grace Turtle & Romany Dear, CAConrad, Elio J. Carranza
Radical accessibility is not just about accommodating; it is about transforming. It is about rethinking how institutions function, how art is experienced, and how care can be embedded in the very fabric of our spaces and interactions. Institutions—including art spaces—have long been complicit in exclusion, separation, and harm. But what happens when we place care, embodied experience, and sensory engagement at the core of our practices?
Through readings, play, embodied experiences, and meditations, this afternoon disrupts, expands, breaks open, and reaches out.
Friday 21 March: Sexy Freaks – Guest curated by Johanna Hedva, with Tamara Antonijević, Nik Timková, and Zuzana Žabková, of the collective björnsonova
An afternoon of readings, discussion, and film screenings that languish in the themes of erotics, divinity, abjection, and monstrosity. With Tamara Antonijević, Nik Timková, and Zuzana Žabková, of the collective björnsonova.
Starting from their writing and choreographic practices, Johanna Hedva and björnsonova propose close readings of authors and artists who approach themes of embodiment and authorship as sites of loss, negativity, disjunction, and abjection. They will talk about consumption, intercourse with those beyond the grave, disfiguration, and oozing glands as formulations of the problem that a body is a site of resistance and its failures, but also where desire joyfully comes to rot. There is a distance to one’s own experience that they’re interested in and that the authors and artists they will focus on also explore. To approach the themes of dysfunctional bodies and ascetic, invisible, mystical erotics, they will watch an excerpt of the vampire movie Dark Angels, zooming in on the struggles of toothless vampires and perform a score for angelic sex after Ida Cradoock’s manual.
Within the discourse focused on self-healing and betterment, Hedva and björnsonova want to question how the ideas of the self, and their own desires of belonging, and being whole, maintain the systems that perpetuate the violence they are claiming to be against.
Participants exhibition and performance programme Rietveld Uncut:
For Rietveld Uncut, Rietveld students worked on projects under the guidance of permanent curators Tomas Adolfs and Tarja Szaraniec. Participants include the following students: Agathe Plouzennec, Anahit Yakubovich & Lau Vander Mijnsbrugge, Carla Chibude Seidemann, Chichy Freja Udsen Obi, Clément Lobjoy, Yun Kwon, Greta Wegmann & Domitille Marchiol, Gabrielle Bouriat—Hardouin, Handa Youn, Kadri-Ann Kivisild, Katinka K. Olrik, Lujza Kramárová, Maïder Hastoy, Mia Kokine Joensen, Minky Kim, Niloofar Salehi, nisan gunalcin, Pauline Oosterhoff & Annemarie Vogel, Simone Winder & Isabel Heatley, Siri Tvorup, Sohju Kim, Wenzhu Song & Yunji Song
Workshop presentation by Staci Bu Shea, Mira Thompson and students, Performance by VAV – moving image students, Queer Sports by Gabriel Fontana
