We invite you for a celebratory reveal of the Material Library and a joyful introduction to the linked workshop series, Material Assemblies.
Are you interested in exploring less extractive, more regenerative approaches to technology in your artistic/design projects? In this two-part workshop, we will be exploring alternative hardware practices in a hands-on manner by engaging with wild clay as well as re-used electronics components to create programmable circuit boards. We will be collectively sourcing, molding, and firing the clay, before painting and soldering the microchips. The workshop will be led by artist Esra Sakir, in collaboration with members of the Earthound Hardware working group.
This spring and fall Arias' Care Ecologies research group is hosting The Ugly Sides of Care Reading Group to invite a joint thinking around the topic of care-friction. For each session, an artist-researcher from the ARIAS network is invited to propose their perspective on care-friction within facilitation, through a discourse of choice. Arias is excited to invite you to the first session of this series with Pernilla Manula Philip, whose research engages with chronic illness, DIY approaches to medical tools, and questions around who gets to shape knowledge and practices of care.
The Lectoraat Art & Spatial Praxis has recently been awarded a seedling grant by the Centre of Expertise for Creative Innovation (CoECI) for its forthcoming project Rehearsing Futures: Strategies for Living Otherwise. Developed in collaboration with the ATD Lectorate at AHK, the project will run throughout this calendar year and address the normalisation of far-right political language and framing in social and cultural spaces. It will bring together activist collectives, artists, organisers, and educators to work with performative methods seeking to articulate practices of refusal within cultural and educational spaces in response to these shifts in norms.
Rietveld Sandberg Research and The Hmm are collaborating in the research project Connecting Otherwise. Together, we made a survey to understand how artists, designers, and cultural workers navigate the landscape of digital systems. Please help us fill in this big Big Tech vs Alternatives survey. You can find it here . The survey is anonymous. You can leave your email addresses if you want to stay informed about the project.
The Materiality research group is presenting the publication: How Material Comes to Matter - Workshops as sites of collective resistance and reimagination. This publication evolved from a shared urgency among students, educators, and researchers to foreground the pivotal role of workshops and labs in art and design education, and to recognize them as critical and versatile spaces for collaborative learning and material-driven inquiry.
A hardcopy of the publication is available for 10 euros: shop.rietveldacademie.nl
A free online version is available on: etherport.org
The launch of the publication 'How Material Comes to Matter - Workshops as sites of collective resistance and reimagination' took place on the 13th of March at bookstore San Serriffe, with guests Harriet Rose Morley and Clem Edwards with introduction by Anja Groten and Márk Redele.
The Art & Spatial Praxis research group is proud to announce the publication of three new contributions on its Plot(ting) platform. Each of these articles explore language and its various registers; the colonial historicity of form, identity and structure; the affective, imaginative and reparative possibilities to be found in the midst of manufactured chaos.
The Art and Spatial research group is delighted to share a series of videos, presented as the culmination of the ‘Tactics of the Plot’ working group. You can watch the video series below and on the research group’s Plot(ting) platform, available here: plotting.rietveldsandberg.nl/?page_id=1056
On November 19, 2025 the Material Library organised the first Material Assembly. Together with a group of students, we followed the material traces of the trees felled on the neighbouring plot of the academy and visited the sawmill of Stadshout in Ouderkerk aan de Amstel.
On Wednesday November 26, 2025, together with a group of students and teachers, we had the rare opportunity to visit and work in the Atelier building of the Rijksmuseum and NICAS (The Netherlands Institute for Conservation+Art+Science+). We were introduced to the workshops and laboratories at NICAS exploring different temporalities of art-making through the lens of material-based research. After that, we received a tour with presentations at four conservation studios: Textiles, Inks and Pigments (RCE), Furniture, Imaging Room. We ended with a guided conversation, collective mapping exercise and reading that attempted shifting our gaze from the moment of the now to the wider temporal dimension of conception, development and multiple phases of becoming what we perceive today of an artwork. We focused on the long and arduous processes that precede the perception of an artwork as a finished product. How can we unravel materials and techniques used in artworks? And does this affect the meaning of the artwork in the present?
On September 30, 2025 we gathered for the closing of the Loom residency. Loom has been developing their artistic research project Rhine river rehearsal – reimagining a river with the Art & Spatial Praxis research group. On September 30 we followed their audio tour Leaky Turns, Stories from Amsterdam's Waterlands and heard more from their past year of research and residency. Take a look at the video made by Yana Khazanovich and photos made by Konstantin Guz. The podcast can be listened in your podcast app or here .
What becomes of water when we look at it through the lens of different artists and researchers? And how might it assist us in looking at the world differently? Seven practitioners individually welcome us to a water-related place in Amsterdam, and explain what this place tells us about water when we listen, look, and think carefully. Each interview is preceded by a listening exercise, guided by the voice of the interviewee; intimately connected to their chosen location. These recordings can be experienced onsite, or wherever you find yourself, with a moment to spare.
Loom, practice for cultural transformation, has been developing their artistic research project Rhine River Rehearsal – reimagining a river with the Art & Spatial Praxis research group. Next to the audio tour Leaky Turns , they made the publication Rhine River Rehearsal.
Rietveld Sandberg Research is delighted to share that a consortium led by Anja Groten, Head of Sandberg Design has been awarded funding by the Taskforce for Applied Research SIA (part of NWO) under the Artistiek en Ontwerpend Onderzoek 2025 scheme. “Connecting Otherwise: Developing artistic/design research methodologies and workshop formats for regenerative digital practices” will run from September 2025 to August 2027 with a subsidy of € 125,000 supporting the development of interdisciplinary workshop formats exploring regenerative aesthetics and the materiality of digital technologies through hands-on and collective research approaches.
The latest issue of the Boekman magazine explores the theme of ‘Culture as a problem solver’ and examines the role of art and culture in solving social issues. Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, Sabine Niederer, and Patricia de Vries wrote about the Climate Imaginaries at Sea project in the article ‘Klimaatverbeelding als artistieke praktijk - een ander perspectief op klimaatverandering’.
Our colleagues at ARIAS produced a four-part podcast series [un]learning scripts. What does it mean to [un]learn scripts? Different guests answer this question by bringing forward their practices and ways of knowing through topics like storytelling, archives, touch, emotion, rehearsal, and illness. Together, they seek to understand which stories matter and for whom, and to challenge the limiting, violent, and dominant scripts guiding the specific roles we perform in modern society. These scripts, however, are not written in ink - there are always possibilities to rewrite, revise and redefine them.
The Art & Spatial Praxis research group is proud to announce the publication of three new articles featuring queer and anti-colonial perspectives on its Plot(ting) platform.