Clementine Edwards – Jewellery Linking- Bodies Research Fellow 2021-2022

Necklace, Clementine Edwards, 2017. Photo © Meredith Turnbull

Clementine Edwards is an artist, editor and writer from Naarm/Melbourne and based in Rotterdam. Her work is guided by the ongoing research line material kinship, which thinks kin beyond bloodlines and material beyond extraction.

website: http://clementineedwards.com/

From the Jewellery Linking-Bodies department, Clementine will explore aesthetic strategies and develop works that map the connection between colonialism and climate crisis. A key concept is the miniature. By devoting herself to studio practice that, while ambitious, is neither bombastic nor grandiose, Clementine wishes to evoke wonder through the tiny and continue to de-link her work from cultures of (material) extraction. In particular, this means focusing on femme work, complex work, anti-heroic work. Of particular interest during her time at Rietveld is emphasising jewellery as an intimate, embodied and pertinent framework for one’s artistic practice. For more information about Clementine’s research please visit -> here

Monday Evening Lecture with Ingeborg Reichle

Toxic Plastic Politics: Rethinking Plastic Pollution through Art and Activism

Pinar Yoldas, An Ecosystem of Excess (2014)

Politics of ecology and environmental activism have found increasing resonance in the art world in recent years, giving rise to a wide range of artistic responses to ecological emergencies like climate change and other forms of environmental destruction driven by the violence of contemporary fossil fuels-based capitalism. At the intersection of art and activism a new sphere has evolved, which has become particularly attractive to critical hybrid practitioners, who often have a background in art and activism as well as in science. Artists have become active players in much needed dynamics of socio-ecological transformation
processes towards a more sustainable future by articulating critical frameworks and introducing environmental justice works to art and academia. With the creation of meaningful visual artworks or the fostering of collaborative actions, artists seek to increase community
resilience and inspire individual actions directed towards systemic change while raising awareness about the urgency and complexity of global challenge like plastic pollution.

Ingeborg Reichle is a contemporary art historian and media theorist. In recent years she served as Professor in the Department of Media Theory at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and as founding chair of the Department of Cross-disciplinary Strategies (CDS), designing an integrated BA study programme on applied studies in art, science, philosophy, and global challenges. Her current area of research and teaching is the encounter of the arts with cutting-edge technologies such as biotechnology and synthetic biology, taking also into account artistic responses to systemic risks and global challenges such as climate change and ecological collapse in order to develop a critical understanding of the role of twenty-first century media arts. She is the author of a number of books including Art in the Age of Technoscience: Genetic Engineering, Robotics, and Artificial Life in Contemporary Art, Springer, Vienna 2009 and Plastic Ocean: Art and Science Responses to Marine Pollution, De Gruyter, Berlin, Boston 2021.

Monday 25th of October 17:00 Auditorium – FedLev Building

Gerrit Rietveld Academie Fred. Roeskestraat 961076 ED Amsterdam
We hope to see you there!

INTRODUCTION WEEK

Workshop Grip and Grasp by Gitte Nygaard

“The hand is the window on to the mind“ Kant wrote, and another clever guy has added; “the hand bone is connected to the brain bone, and the brain bone is connected to the social bone“.

We have become increasingly alienated from a physical understanding of the world. But for millennia, we as humans have understood the world through things, through touch, and our connection to other people has been through what they made. 

Through our hands we shape our world and through our making of our world we form ourselves. We reach with our hands and touch with our hands, and with this reaching and touching we come to understand how things feel and are. We will spend one day to evoke and examine how sensory qualities of material are perceived through making and what we can learn about our interaction with material.

Workshop The Collective Sound Boxes by Maya Felixbrodt

This workshop is an invitation to get closer to the body: one‘s own body; the surrounding bodies;  the collective body as well as objects as non-human bodies. All of these different elements will be examined in relation to the space they exist in.  

How does each of these bodies move? How does it feel? Does it sound? How does the relationship with the other bodies, living and inanimate, affect each other? Can we articulate new relations as collective bodies? 

We will dive into exploration through movement, touch and sound; through action and observation; play, improvisation, composition and choreography- with exercises based on the Laban Movement Analysis System (LBMS). 

Creative Sushi workshop „Rietveldish /Jewel sushi“ by Q Hisashi Shibata