event
15
may '25
Performance lecture by Annette-Carina van der Zaag
Performance lecture by Annette-Carina van der Zaag
In Spring 2025, the Critical Inquiry research group is hosting a project by Annette-Carina van der Zaag, drawing on their larger initiative Aesthetics of Ruination, co-curated with Rory Crath. Titled ‘Rupture and the Otherwise’, the project combines theoretical and artistic approaches, issuing in a performance lecture offering a haptic exploration of the relation between ruination and rupture. Van der Zaag's performance lecture is open both to students/alumni of Rietveld/Sandberg and to the broader public. To register your attendance please sign up here: eventix.shop/maj5q5fg
Aesthetics of Ruination: Rupture and the Otherwise
This project is part of the multidimensional research initiative Aesthetics of Ruination which seeks to explore an aesthetics of ruination to remember the past while breaking open more liveable futures. The archival dimension of AoR, Archival Futures and the Art of Living Otherwise, is co-curated by Annette-Carina van der Zaag and Rory Crath, in collaboration with Visual AIDS, and brings together a group of artists and scholars for an immersive studio and symposium held in New York in 2025. This dimension sets out from the sensory and affective registers put in motion by Robert Farber and Ronald Lockett, two visual artists active in the early 1990s, who each in their own way, through multi-media paintings and scrap-metal collages, turned backward to pasts no longer theirs in order to reach towards a more liveable future.
Rupture and the Otherwise, an artistic and theoretical research initiative by Annette-Carina van der Zaag, takes a different point of departure. The project engages performance and wearable sculpture in a haptic exploration of ‘ruination as rupture’ with particular attention to its embodied and sensory dimensions. The project is embedded in the resonances between theoretical writing and embodied performance, exploring the hapticality of returning to, reworking and wearing an object inherently tethered to multiple ruptures that refuse to be captured through visual or written representation. Working towards an eventual performance lecture, the project explores the ways in which theoretical work (concepts, speculation, writing) emerges from embodied sensory experience and vice versa. How might rupture as conceptual and haptic register gesture beyond that which feels unliveable in the present? And what more liveable futures might we encounter in this otherwise dimension?
Rupture and the Otherwise, an artistic and theoretical research initiative by Annette-Carina van der Zaag, takes a different point of departure. The project engages performance and wearable sculpture in a haptic exploration of ‘ruination as rupture’ with particular attention to its embodied and sensory dimensions. The project is embedded in the resonances between theoretical writing and embodied performance, exploring the hapticality of returning to, reworking and wearing an object inherently tethered to multiple ruptures that refuse to be captured through visual or written representation. Working towards an eventual performance lecture, the project explores the ways in which theoretical work (concepts, speculation, writing) emerges from embodied sensory experience and vice versa. How might rupture as conceptual and haptic register gesture beyond that which feels unliveable in the present? And what more liveable futures might we encounter in this otherwise dimension?
Annette-Carina van der Zaag is a Senior Lecturer in Humanities at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. She also works as an adjunct Assistant Professor at Smith College (MA Social Work), Massachusetts, where she teaches an elective in practice research and arts-based methodology. She is a tutor at the Sandberg Instituut, in the Critical Studies Department where she teaches the seminar in Gender and Sexuality Studies. She studied Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam and then moved to London where she lived for 15 years. She holds an MA (2006) and PhD (2013) in Sociology from Goldsmiths, University of London.
research group
Critical Inquiry
Critical Inquiry