Category: Uncategorised

On Material Kinship: Fossilised Lives, Queer Plastics & Jewellery Magic
Lecture Synopsis:  Clementine Edwards will present a poetic essay that introduces her artistic research material kinship and trace its ‘family’ lineage, which predates both her gold and silversmithing studies and her own birth. Material kinship is interested in complicating notions of kinship beyond the normative or biological, and complicating notions of material beyond the non-sentient. 

Clementine Edwards is a Rotterdam-based artist whose practice is led by sculpture. Her work looks at how certain experiences and relationships might be enriched and expanded through material, and at the reproductive potential of non-sentient materials. Her ongoing research line is material kinship, which she locates in the context of climate colonialism. Despite ‘difficult’ subject matter, her artworks invite intimacy via detail, story, and precariousness. In 2021 Clementine will publish The Material Kinship Reader,co-edited with Kris Dittel. clementineedwards.com 

Lecture synopsis:
The prominent Dutch poet and secretary to stadholder Frederick Henry, Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687), was a true polymath. He was a diplomat, an art connoisseur, a bibliophile, collector, musician, scholar and a perfumer. Mainly by means of his correspondence, he maintained a vast network of contacts reaching ‘everybody who mattered’ in the Dutch Golden Age. It is estimated that Huygens wrote and received more than 100,000 letters.

Ineke Huysman: works as a researcher at the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands in Amsterdam. At present, she is project manager of the Correspondence of Constantijn Huygens, the Correspondence of Johan de Witt, the Correspondences of Dutch Stadtholders-wives and the Diaries of Willem de Clercq and the digitization of the autograph collection of the Royal Archives.She graduated at the University of Amsterdam with a thesis on the life of Béatrix de Cusance, a 17^th-century Duchess of Lorraine. 

Oct 5 2020

Turning Towards 

Lecture Synopsis: The etymology of the term queer (which has its roots in the Indo-European word twist) invokes its shifting meaning as a descriptor for non-normative sexualities, and as a spatial and temporal orientation. I want to consider twisting or turning towards someone or something that is needed, wanted, or felt as missing as an act of desire. In offering up the twist or turn and their possibilities I look to examples taken from visual culture—a dance, a gaze, a sensation. How might these moves also call up forms of collectivity and care?

Rosie Haward is a writer and researcher based in Amsterdam. Her work engages with queer and feminist studies and visual culture, and the queer potential of experimental fiction. She also is involved with various models of collaborative practice, and currently co-runs the reading group Straight to Hell. She has an MA in Critical Studies from the Sandberg Instituut and a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London.