Art as Relational Infrastructures 2026, Sonja Bäumel and Sonia Kazovsky
Evolving from Biome Nest (2024) and The Magic of Jewellery (2025), Sonja Bäumel and Sonia Kazovsky continued their long-term exploration of relational infrastructures with Puppetry as a Stage for Love, approaching art and design education as a platform for political and social engagement with local life. The project investigated how inter- and transdisciplinary artistic practices can operate as meaningful forms of participation, encouraging students to engage with society through collective making, shared responsibility and by approaching artistic education as a situated civic practice in which learning unfolds through participation.
Developed in dialogue with the Amsterdam Oost neighbourhood organisation Dynamo and linked to the Gerrit Rietveld Academie’s Studium Generale theme of Love as a Practice, the project approached puppetry as a stage for embodied knowledge and collective narration. Working with simple materials and accessible techniques, participants built figures that could hold voices, gestures and stories. Puppetry functioned as a relational device in which participants could rehearse forms of care, attention and mutual listening through making and storytelling. It simultaneously opened up a space for different voices to emerge via collective play and narration.
Rooted in the Jewellery – Linking Bodies department, the pilot project was open to students from all departments of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie as well as participants from the Dynamo community in Amsterdam Oost. The workshops centred on the joy of making together while cultivating collective responsibility through skill-sharing, storytelling, and small performative situations that foregrounded collaborative learning and the sharing of knowledge across different experiences and backgrounds.
The collaboration with Dynamo also introduced students to the local welfare infrastructure of Amsterdam Oost and the social fabric that sustains it. For international students in particular it was an opportunity to engage with the city beyond the academy as well as with existing neighbourhood networks through artistic exchange. In the workshops, participants encountered how cultural and social infrastructures are sustained via local forms of everyday life. At the same time, the project opened the Gerrit Rietveld Academie as a space of encounter for residents of Amsterdam Oost, allowing participants from the neighbourhood to enter the academy and take part in collective making alongside students.
The process treated making as a relational practice. Puppets became intermediaries through which participants could speak, listen, and imagine together, creating temporary infrastructures of exchange between the academy and the local life and enabling participants in social forms that previously might not have been familiar or even accessible to them.
The workshops culminated in a puppetry theatre performance at the Pavilion at the Rietveld Academie, bringing the process to a joyful, public close.
