The TXT Department is delighted to invite you to the launch of the new publication: Unruly Threads. TXT Reader 2021-2025.

This special event will celebrate the publication, which explores the curriculum and pedagogies at the department throughout the past 4 years. This publication unfolds an indirect conversation among colleagues; a container holding different perspectives of the current staff and guests of the TXT department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam (NL). 

TXT combines textile and text, interweaving the relationship between materiality and the written word. These pages give way to ten different voices on creative practice, education, activism, thought and learning tools, inspired by educator Palmer Parker’s question: how do teacher, student and subject get woven into the fabric of community that learning and living requires? 

Date: Thursday, 27 November 2025
Time: 17:30 – 18:30
Place: Weaving workshop, TXT Department
Address: Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Fred. Roeskestraat 96, 1076 ED Amsterdam

Programme:
- Welcome by Mercedes Azpilicute (head TXT).
- Brief Presentation of the publication by Nina Glockner from n.k.g. publications & designer Josefina Contin Zapata.
- Drinks and chat.

Listen, Iqra Tanveer writes: "If you enter the department at its earliest hour, you can hear the materials speak in silence; the songs of each being that are a part of this ecosystem reverberate in the space.” Visualise knowledge through fabric metaphor, Giulia Damiani suggests. The notion (and practice) of knowledge is a knotty, messy tangle, to be unravelled. Sink in deeper. Jasper Coppes explains that beginnings are muddy, we should want to stir the pot. “Understanding ourselves and our environment can only happen when what is repressed is allowed to surface, to be seen and heard. In mud we might finally start to take root.“ Stay in the loop. Joost Post creates an inclusive dictionary of looping. A ‘fibrefossil’ has outdated ideas on knitting, wrongfully gender-essentialising it. ‘Knitciphergraphy’ explains the art of encoding and decoding messages through intricate knitting patterns, combining the craft of knitting with cryptographic techniques. “Even though knitting circles remain the butt of many jokes, these spaces can have radical implications.” These bodies of writing reveal the learning environment with its human, and more-than-human actors. Here we attempt, head of the department Mercedes Azpilicueta proposes, to embed practices of care by doing community, cultivating the interdisciplinary and practicing performativity.

With contributions by Iqra Tanveer, Giulia Damiani, Mercedes Azpilicueta, Severine Amsing, Gleb(s) Maiboroda, Erik Wong, Giene Steenman, Riet Wijnen, Jasper Coppes and Joost Post. 

Edited by Arden Rzewnicki and the TXT Department


Designed by Josefina Contin Zapata

Published by n.k.g. publications and the TXT Department

With special thanks to all the students that contributed throughout the past 4 years.

 

NOTE: During the launch it is possible to purchase the publication for Eu 30,-.

Students can purchase the publication with a student’s discount for Eu 20,-

 

Looking forward to seeing you at the launch!