GERRIT RIETVELD ACADEMIE & UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM
Flyer, I Wanna Split Up, 2024 25-05-’24 till 26-05-’24
ART & RESEARCH (RIETVELD X UvA)
EXHIBITION AND PUBLICATION LAUNCH | I WANNA SPLIT UP
Curated by Marta Pagliuca Pelacani
This weekend INDEBT is excited to be hosting the exhibition and publication launch of the Artistic Research Program: a collaborative track by the University of Amsterdam and Gerrit Rietveld Academie.
The exhibition titled I Wanna Split Up, curated by Marta Pagliuca Pelacani, presents the collaborative journey of the students within academia and artistic practice, illuminating interdisciplinary work that explores the concepts of cyberspace, surveillance, voyeurism, conspiracies, belief systems, the body, and memory.
The Art & Research Program is a collaboration between the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the University of Amsterdam. Initially developed in 2006 and now in its 13th edition, it aims to combine the most productive aspects and activities of both institutions. To this end, the program provides art students the opportunity to engage with academic knowledge production while involving university students in artistic research and creative processes.
Departing from the idea that certain overlaps occur between practices in academia and art, the program stimulates students to share and exchange perspectives and methodologies, as well as challenge methodological traditions, so as to create renewed modes of research, while learning about each other’s fields of study in the process. Art & Research brings an extremely wide range of disciplines together, with this edition’s participants coming from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie departments of Architectural Design, VAV (Moving Image), Image and Language, Graphic Design, Fine Arts, designLAB, and DOGTime; the University of Amsterdam’s departments of Literary and Cultural Analysis, Art History, Media Culture Anthropology, Politics, Psychology, Law and Economics (PPLE); and the Philosophy department of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
During the program, twenty selected students work in small groups on collaborative projects for the full length of an academic year. The process begins during a three-day training retreat at Wongema in Groningen, where the participants map research interests and methodologies in a group-wide brainstorming session, to make shared themes and possible research projects come to the surface. The research process involves engaging with theory, working with materials, collaborative writing, and presentations to invited guest critics, culminating in a publication and a group exhibition at the end of the program.
For this edition, the students focused on a number of overlapping issues close to their life-world: cyberspace, surveillance, voyeurism, conspiracies, belief systems, the body, and memory. Over the course of the year, they refined and elaborated their topics in dialogue with one another and with the tutors. The resulting texts presented in this publication combine creative writing with theoretical discourse and reflect both challenges and opportunities that emerge through sustained collaboration across disciplines.
The above-mentioned projects were realized alongside the students’ regular schedules. While they were guided by tutors, guest lecturers, and other professionals, the students also actively contributed to the development of the program’s content as it progressed. Crucially, most of the organizational work involved in the production of this publication and the final group exhibition was in their hands, which further contributes to the uniqueness of the program.