We’re sinking deeper into our pillows, gliding through imagined scapes. As flesh fades, bones are given words. They use them to gossip about skin’s softness and reminisce on bearing weight. Within dreams, bodies morph with certainty. Our legs evaporate into clouds, our fingers run through screensaver fields, our hearts beat at the rhythm of an eight a.m. alarm.
The Jewellery – Linking Bodies Department wonders what dreams our bones dream. In this exhibition we explore the permanence of imagination. Join us as we wander.
Will you wonder too?
Opening May 9, 17:00 – 21:00 Exhibition Duration: May 9, 17:00 – 21:00 May 10, 12:00 – 18:00
Hannah Falcone Melwin Funk Dana Haire Isabel Heatley Anne-Sophie de Lange June Querido Niloofar Salehi Hung-Fu Tsai
This workshop proposes a sustained, critical engagement with Physarum polycephalum – a non-neural, decentralized organism that resists classification and yet continues to capture the speculative imagination across disciplines. Neither metaphor nor specimen, the blob is approached here as a material operator: a being whose presence unsettles, whose behavior invites thought, and whose slimy form exposes the limits of anthropocentric knowledge systems.
The condition of being slimy – viscous, ungraspable – has long carried moral, aesthetic, and political weight. In philosophy and cultural discourse, slime appears at the threshold between form and body, self and other, pure and impure. It disturbs categorical clarity and often signals the presence of something transgressive, toxic, or threatening. Slime, in this sense, is not merely a substance but a semiotic crisis, a material affect that binds disgust and attraction in the same gesture.
This workshop invites participants to engage with the blob through modes of witnessing, proximity, and discomfort, rather than control or explanation. We will work through the affective entanglements that slime provokes – revulsion, fascination, care, unease – foregrounding how these responses are shaped by cultural codes, power structures, and epistemological habits.
Drawing from new materialism, feminist theory, relational ontology, we will consider what it means to learn in the presence of an organism that eludes mastery. What does it mean to be ethically implicated by something that cannot be fully known or possessed? How might discomfort become the generative ground for reflection and change? In an era marked by ecological precarity and systemic breakdown, we explore the possibility that it is not hope or certainty, but shared fear and unease, that opens space for collective transformation.
Virág Szálas-Motesiczky (b. 1990, former Czechoslovakia) is an artist-researcher whose work interrogates the material and symbolic residues of post-socialist transition. Her practice investigates how notions of collectivity, transgenerational customs, and geopolitical traces co-produce social imaginaries, asking why historical legacies continue to delimit prospective futures. Combining archival excavation with situated fieldwork, she frames objects and sites as epistemic actors that reveal entanglements among governance, memory, and material agency. Educated at Design Academy Eindhoven (foundation) and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (BFA), she co-founded a speculative studio dedicated to collaborative modes of inquiry, located in a converted Protestant church in the Netherlands. In September 2025, she will enter the Master Education in Arts program at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, where she turns to pedagogy as a critical technology for collective problem-solving and the creation of equitable space. By embedding artistic research within participatory learning environments, she aims to cultivate transdisciplinary publics capable of re-imagining socio-ecological relations beyond anthropocentric paradigms through group dynamics and collective narratives.
Dear friends and colleagues of the Jewellery – Linking Bodies department,
We hope this message finds you well, and that you are welcoming the arrival of spring with renewed energy, both personally and collectively.
We are very pleased to invite you to our upcoming public event:
Talk & Dialogue Tuesday, 8 April | 15:30 – 18:30 The Gym (–1 floor), Rietveld Building, Gerrit Rietveld Academie Frederik Roeskestraat 96, 1076 ED Amsterdam
In collaboration with the Stichting Françoise van den Bosch Foundation, we will welcome back our esteemed alumnus Célio P. Braga, who will be in conversation with Corrina Goutos, current resident of the Françoise van den Bosch Foundation. We have had the pleasure of collaborating with the Foundation for many years, organizing resident talks and moments of exchange — and we look forward to continuing this meaningful relationship.
Schedule:
15:30 – 15:40: Welcome by Sonja Bäumel 15:40 – 16:00: Introduction by Jeannette Jansen and Astrid Ubbink (board, Françoise van den Bosch Foundation) 16:00 – 16:30: Talk by Corrina Goutos 16:30 – 17:00: Talk by Célio Braga 17:00 – 17:30: In Dialogue: Corrina Goutos & Célio Braga 17:30 – 18:30: Meet & Greet & closing drink
We warmly invite you to join us for this afternoon of conversation, reflection, and informal exchange.
Bio Célio Braga (Brazil, 1963) graduated from the Rietveld Academy in 2000. Since then, he has been working as a visual artist, developing a practice characterized by a performative and multidisciplinary approach, driven by a continuous spirit of experimentation. Braga employs a wide range of materials and techniques to create drawings, paintings, photographs, sculptures, body-related objects, installations, and occasionally performances and videos. The theme of skin serves as a central thread in his work, functioning as a metaphor to explore both contemporary and timeless artistic concerns, such as the human body in its states of wholeness, fragility, transformation, injury, and transience. His works have been exhibited in numerous galleries, museums, cultural institutions, and art fairs across various countries, including the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, France, Spain, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and others. In the Netherlands, his works are part of the collections of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Textile Museum Tilburg, CODA Museum Eindhoven, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam.
About Celio’s Talk:While I do not make jewellery, my practice reflects a similar attention to detail, precision, and sensitivity, sharing the meticulous craftsmanship and intimate relationship with the body that defines jewellery-making. In this lecture, I will present a selection of works created between 2001 and 2025, spanning 24 years of my artistic practice. The chosen images are guided by their connection to the human body, both in a physical sense and in a symbolic and philosophical manner. I will discuss my sources of inspiration and the essential role that materials play in conveying my ideas. Additionally, I will explore how my working process—rooted in repetition and time-intensive techniques—becomes a generator of meaning, shaping both the form and the conceptual depth of my work.
BioCorrina Goutos (1991, NY, USA) is an artist working in jewelry, objects, and installation currently based in Hamburg, Germany. Having coined the term “Anthrosmithing” to describe her interdisciplinary practice- Corrina renounces the concept of a “raw material”, instead considering that when a craftsperson imprints themselves on a material, they are but one of many agents constantly reshaping it. Corrina’s future artifacts tell a story of mankind, from achievements to decadence. Precise pre-industrial handicraft is applied to post-consumer detritus, with the same intention a smith would give a rare resource of Earth. With radical consideration of the political ecology of non-human and human agents, Corrina’s eerily harmonious conglomerates dismantle hierarchical narratives of the master craftsman with nature at his disposal, instead eliciting a sense of connection through makingwith materials to achieve material fluency.
Corrina received her BFA in Jewelry and Objects from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2013 and has been an active participant in international craft exhibitions, such as Munich Jewelry Week, in the decade following. She has twice been honored as an AJF Young Artist Award Finalist, and is the recipient of several distinctions in sustainable fashion. She is increasingly recognized for her large format installations, and with them, her expansive and fluid definition of contemporary jewelry and object-smithing.
About Corrina’s talk:with the Gerrit Rietveld academy I will be sharing my 5 plus years of research pertaining to being a smith of the Anthropocene, story-telling the two-way exchange of non-humans with humans and sharing my take on the extended body. Delving into the diverse formats I employ, and words I smith, which give shape and context to the speculative artifacts, cyborgs and altars of material culture I create, we will postulate on the potential of attunement and the antiquity of the craft narrative.
