chapter

Introduction

How Material Comes to Matter

Workshops as sites of collective resistance and reimagination

Anja Groten, Márk Redele

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.

Although there is a common agreement among students and educators that “thinking” and “making” are intertwined processes, there is a deep-rooted division that persists within academic frameworks. This publication aims to discuss the hierarchies and exclusionary practices that frequently arise within academia, such as the disconnect between classroom learning and material experimentation in workshops. Drawing from diverse perspectives, the contributors aspire to cultivate alternative, collective, and reciprocal approaches to learning with and through materiality.

How Material Comes to Matter begins with the acknowledgement that the planet we inhabit has been damaged through processes that implicate us all. In the face of the unfolding climate catastrophe and increasing social inequalities, it has become impossible to ignore the entanglement of humans with the material world, the ecosystems we inhabit and disrupt. What we call “material-based research” emerges from this recognition; it’s a way of attending to matter not as inert resources, but as active participants in shaping how we live, design, and imagine futures. Material-based research asks how materials themselves—entangled with histories of extraction, survival, and resistance—can become agents in shaping new knowledges and futures.

Turning towards materiality is an attempt to make sense of and negotiate the catastrophic times we live in—a time in which material realities could not diverge more extremely, and wealth and power could not be distributed more unevenly. Materials are being re-examined in sociology, philosophy, and cultural theory. Philosophy strands such as new materialism, actor-network-theory, and posthumanism orient us towards things, matter, and ecosystems, and urge us to take seriously the entanglement of human and nonhuman actors.

In her presentation at the lecture night in December 2024, researcher and designer Julia Ihls proposed that matter possesses its own agency, an autonomous existence with contradictions and conditions. [add page number] This perspective is particularly relevant in the field of bio-design, where the integration of living materials and organisms into design challenges conventional notions of materiality and ethics.

The call to acknowledge nonhuman participation in the collective of human-organism-animal-thing-machine has enabled arts and sciences to reformulate cultural imaginations of how we relate to and affect our environment, helping to amplify concerns about human involvement in the unfolding climate injustices that envelop our time. While these perspectives broaden our imaginations, they also risk abstraction and detachment, skipping over urgent social justice demands by those already living with the consequences of extractivism and ecological collapse.

Tracing the dark and storied past of phosphorus, artist Clem Edwards reveals the deeply entangled lineage of the element, from the alchemist’s basement to colonial industry, and imperial warfare to modern geopolitical violence. [add page number]

Clem’s careful disentanglement of phosphorus’ implicancies reminds us of the necessity to stay alert about claims that center more-than-human perspectives to create new climate imaginaries. That is, many such attempts risk jumping over and deprioritizing unresolved “social issue demands by racialized groups for the “greater good’” of an ecosystem.”

Against this backdrop, we invite our collaborators and readers to pay greater attention to material-based research, the “simultaneous thinking and sensing of various moments of material existence,” and how they matter.

As artists, designers and researchers, the conviction to take seriously knowledge produced and shared through the senses leads us to revisit the format of the workshop. Two meanings surface when we trace its genealogy: the workshop as a physical site of artisanal and artistic production, and the more ephemeral meaning of the workshop as a format for assembling groups of people to produce and achieve something together in a short amount of time. Far from neutral spaces, workshops are sites of contestation where hierarchies of knowledge, expectations of productivity, and neoliberal ideals of innovation are negotiated.

This publication brings together both meanings of “workshop,” and is interested in the different methods of learning and productivity they have inherited. Workshops—or, in some contexts Labs—bring about particular ways of coexisting in a space, along with social codes, and forms of interaction, such as the skill of negotiating the expectations of those who enter the workshop without much experience. Expectations of how much time certain processes take are recalibrated when they do not align with the wider ethos, pace, and culture of the space. Students at art and design schools learn to attune to these conditions, to the rhythm and prevailing social-material conduct of a workshop.

The conversation with bio-designer and researcher Sam Edens opens up protocols of communal care and safety when working with living organisms. It proposes collective vocalization exercises that make the often implicit handling of equipment and materials explicit and tangible to others. [add page number] These practices are not only safety measures, they also give voice to the materials and the processes they undergo, cultivate students’ sense of agency, and foster sustained critical attention toward the actions they undertake.

Workshop specialist Mathild de Clerc further reflects on such socio-material protocols—specifically, on how the ways we do and make, as well as the decision about which materials and equipment get to enter these spaces, have a significant impact on how we relate to each other as people—as fellow students, colleagues, and friends, and on the ways we work and exist together. [add page number]

The workshops at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, specifically, carry peculiar social-material conducts, temporalities, and practices of coexistence: slowness, care, cooperation, openness to the unexpected.

In Catastrophic Times by Isabelle Stengers reminds us where economic growth and the innovation economies have led us, urges us to slow down, and make ourselves pay attention. Her proposition—the Art of Paying Attention, which is not simply the capacity to pay attention but a matter of learning and “cultivating–making,” ourselves to pay attention—is an assignation to concretely reinvent modes of production.

“Making in the sense that attention here is not related to that which is defined as a priori worthy of attention, but as something that creates an obligation to imagine, to check, to envisage, consequences that bring into play connections between what we are in the habit of keeping separate.” * * While critical attention must be paid to the use and distribution of material on a larger global scale (i.e. tracing carbon footprints, toxic materials, and waste production), it is equally important to consider the socio-material intricacies that are close to us. It is as if the clock ticks slower in the workshops. Workshops are not only places of manufacture, but also laboratories for learning how to attune to an environment, its rhythm and social conditions, and how to act collectively. Such sites of making bring about particular (not universal) collective conditions—social-material conducts and forms of interaction that derive from the necessity of taking care of a space, maintaining material repositories, tools, and infrastructure.

How Material Comes to Matter departs from the assumption that materials are not inert matter but agents entangled with histories, politics, and futures. Following Sara Ahmed’s call to consider the “grounded nature of use,” we consider materials as carriers of histories of extraction, transplantation, and resistance. Karen Barad reminds us that “practices of knowing are material engagements that reconfigure the world.” In this light, workshops become spaces where materials can narrate their own utility, revealing new possibilities for knowledge and meaning. Knowledge-making is always world-making.

Marjolein Bol, a historian of craft, heritage, knowledge, and the environment prompts us to look to the past and learn from the ways institutional practices of collection, preservation, and repair in Western Europe have shaped what is considered valuable. She also raises questions about traditional notions of permanence and the initial impulse behind creating lasting objects. [add page number]

To reimagine material engagement, we evoke decolonial thought, particularly Sylvia Wynter’s vision of cultural production as a dynamic of resistance. From Caribbean histories of rebellion and survival, we inherit models of “reparative rebellious inventions” that resist extractive economies and propose other ways of living with matter. In this light, with How Material Comes to Matter, we ask if spaces of art and design making and material inquiry can serve as marginal yet generative spaces where humans and materials co-produce responses to crisis. Can workshops become sites of resistance and reparation?

Within art and design education, especially at GRA/SI, workshops (werkplaatsen or werkstätte) play a crucial role in accommodating student’s development, both their attempts to materialize critical thought and their development as future critical makers. Engaging with the infrastructures of material-based research and education, one needs to inquire about other, collective and boundary-crossing ways of designing education.

How Materials Comes to Matter has served as an excuse to reach out beyond our usual go-to places and connect people, workshops, departments, and institutions that are usually not accessible to us.

Through initiating various activities and collaboration we tried to sensibly “agitate” the habits and norms established within the specific material cultures, i.e. of the workshops by initiating collaborative formats with carefully chosen partners in and outside of the institution. The aim was to foreground and uplift the researchability of material-based practices and develop formats in which such practices can be questioned in mutually generative ways.

The conversation with IPOP (In Pursuit of Otherwise Possibilities) reflects on the process of co-developing a workshop with BB (Bookbinding workshop at Gerrit Rietveld Academie), in which diverse understandings and practices of embodiment were explored together with the students in the Design department at Sandberg Instituut. The shared goal centered on learning to make and use glue from scratch, not only as a material but also as a way to investigate its performative potential. Beyond its function as a product, glue has a metaphorical stickiness and the abundance of teaching that emerged raised important questions about scarcity, particularly in relation to time and resources in education. Perhaps the most significant outcome of this collaboration was the value of sharing space as facilitators, witnessing each other’s methods, and learning through one another’s approaches to facilitation. As educators, such opportunities to observe and be enriched by each other’s practices are rare, and this exchange highlighted their profound importance. [add page number]

The collaboration also increased awareness of the necessity to critically challenge common tropes that have evolved in and around the workshops as sites for material production—such as “mastery” (of a tool or technique), “novelty” (of an idea, or outcome), as well as “tacit knowledge” (a form of embodied knowledge that allegedly cannot be shared)—and to reconsider them as places of collective material practice, where social and material engagement are closely intermingled.

The streams of research threaded together in this book aim to provoke our collective socio-material imaginations by considering workshops as places of fruitful contestation. We see their potential to resist progress-oriented neoliberal trends and the economization of education, as well as the “maker-space mentality,” which reduces the act of making to efficiency- and output-driven activities. Instead, the trajectory foregrounded how workshops function as socio-material environments of care, where knowledge emerges through shared practice, maintenance, and situated engagement.

How Material Comes to Matter was made possible through an Impulse Grant stimulating cross-institutional collaboration. The grant enabled various material encounters and allowed us to explore the future of a dedicated Material Research group in the context of Gerrit Rietveld Academie. Part of this inquiry took place through a series of activities in which we experimented with formats for collective material research and invited different partners and members of the learning community to collaborate.

Three hands-on workshops took place in the fall of 2024, accommodated by three public lectures. In addition, this publication contains a series of reflective conversations and reviews of the events. The different registers of this inquiry (hands-on making, documentation, and reflection) provided a framework for involving different partners in a meaningful exchange and for exploring with them, over a longer period of time, different registers for collective material research and potential future partnerships.

We hope that this publication foregrounds and uplifts the research potential of collective material practices. We invite researchers, educators, and organizers to test and expand these ideas and consider workshops as decentralized nexuses for material-based inquiry—spaces where practices, questions, and perspectives are brought into dialogue and challenged in mutually generative ways.