Life After Rietveld and Sandberg: Positioning Yourself as an Artist
On Thursday 19 February, a session was be hosted by Mercedes Azpilicueta (Head of TXT department, Rietveld Academie), together with alums Marie Ilse Bourlanges and Waèl el Allouche.
During this session we explored questions such as: How do you place your practice within existing narratives, sectors, or communities? What kinds of dialogues and collaborations do you seek in your work life? How do ethics, responsibility, and care shape the systems we participate in, or help transform them.
The session offered a chance to learn directly from alums as they share their real-world experiences of entering the professional field after graduation.
Find the recording of the session below.
About
Mercedes Azpilicueta
A visual and performance artist from Buenos Aires living and working in Amsterdam. Her artistic practice gathers various characters from the past and the present who address the vulnerable or collective body from a decolonial feminist perspective. In fluid, associative connections she counters rigid narratives of history in an attempt to dismantle them and make room for the affective and dissident voices to emerge. As such, her work manifests in performative and sculptural installations being inspired by speculative and fictional Latino literature, Neo-Baroque art history, contemporary popular culture and new materialism theory. Through collaborative and interdisciplinary practices, she combines “precarious”, craft-based techniques –historically associated with domestic obsolete knowledge– with industrialized productions.
Waèl el Allouche
Artist and Designer Waèl el Allouche graduated from the design department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. He is interested in the way abstractions, such as Data and Algorithms, shape reality and vice versa. By digitizing phenomena and objects from the world around him, he tries to understand them, before returning them to reality as reconstructions.
Marie Ilse Bourlanges
Double graduate of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and a multidisciplinary artist based in Amsterdam. Her practice combines sculptural and performative elements, writing and video, often taking a collaborative approach. Working from an eco-feminist perspective, she explores relational dynamics among humans and with non-humans, attending to tensions between care and control, the material and the ephemeral, the verbal and the non-verbal. In 2023, her first literary work, Mother’s Milk (Jap Sam Books), brought together years of artistic research into psychiatric archives related to the internment of her grandmother, who spent over thirty years at the psychiatric hospital of La Timone in Marseille. This project centers on intergenerational transmission, seeking ways for intimate narratives to resonate collectively and politically.
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.
Did you miss the previous sessions? You can find the recordings here!
