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.

Otherwise_Possible_Connections

Otherwise Possible Connections:

A conversation with IPOP (Elioa Steffens and Szymon Adamczak)

**### Tuesday, 17 December 2024 **

At the GRA/SI, material-based research and learning about and through making takes place across departments, workshops, and facilities, and thus plays a crucial—though often under-articulated—role in art and design education. One focus of this conversation is on understanding how embodied knowledge is transferred in educational settings and how collective material engagement shapes learning processes.

Through support of the CoECI grant, it was possible to invite collaborators to join the project, such as IPOP (In Pursuit of Otherwise Possibilities), an educational artistic research platform exploring how educational institutions can better foster queer artists and their practices. By involving IPOP, we aimed to bring together the different registers and vocabularies of embodied knowledge-sharing, while also catering to the interests and sensitivities of a diverse student body that does not adhere to educational structures rooted in heteronormative and colonial art and design histories.

The collaboration aimed to connect existing efforts at the academy around material-based research, giving special attention to developing a collective and inclusive approach to making those resources and practices accessible to the community—with additional support from IPOP.

A key consideration was the role of workshop-based education within institutional structures. Despite its significance, the workshops often occupy a subordinate position in relation to curricular education, both in terms of decision-making power and resource allocation. We were interested in the potential of IPOP’s work on queering feedback to challenge these structures.

The BB (Bookbinding Workshop) team was invited to join this collaboration due to their collaborative and interdisciplinary approach as well as the toolkits they developed to put anti-disciplinary practice in motion. By offering students the chance to take the tools and materials into spaces other than the workshop itself, they challenge the idea of a workshop as an exclusive and expert-driven space for material production. We wanted to use the collaboration to expand the mobility and spontaneity of workshops and labs, including their equipment.

Both BB and IPOP’s practices are built upon collaboration and offer a unique perspective on the intersection of embodied practice, needs-based pedagogy, and vulnerability in artistic production. Their methodologies embrace open-ended, often uncertain creative processes.

This conversation delves into these questions, examining the ways in which teaching methodologies through embodied practices can reshape pedagogical frameworks and intervene in existing hierarchies. It is a collective reflection on different moments of the collaborative process and not always in chronological order. It was held a month after the workshop took place. What preceded the workshop were several online and offline work sessions during which BB, IPOP and ourselves (Anja Groten and Márk Redele), got to know each other and each other’s ways of working, and developed a conceptual framework that took GLUE as a starting point. GLUE allowed us to explore the relational aspects of material-based research through the lens of situated and collective learning and transfer of embodied forms of knowledge. In IPOP’s publication Queering Artistic Feedback, Antje Nestel asked, “What if there is no work/object [yet] to give feedback on?” In our sessions, we developed this thought further in light of emergent hands-on learning and collective forms of knowledge production.
BB offered a material framework and guidance to produce various types of GLUEs from scratch while IPOP guided us in evoking GLUE’s performative potential.

Participants were first year students of the Design department at Sandberg Instituut as well as two additional participants from the network of IPOP.

A day prior to the workshop, IPOP gave the artist talk “Otherwise Possible Connections: Queering Artistic Feedback,” as part of the Unsettling Bar moderated by Emirhakin. The talk was open to everyone.

As part of their contribution to the workshop, BB invited Vic Hoogstoel from the silkscreen workshop who introduced us to the legacy of the GRA billboard, a 430 cm x 122 cm panel installed in front of the academy, which is a place for students and staff to announce, exhibit, and publish. It was initiated by Kees Maas, the previous workshop manager of the screen printing workshop. For the GLUE workshop we decided to utilize the billboard as a performative space, and rather than focussing on what we pasted on it we focussed on how we paste on it, thus the glue became the focal point.

Aside from experimenting with glue-making and learning about its material properties and performative potential, we did movement and mapping exercises. The following exercises are mentioned in the conversation:

Warm-up exercises: Group moves through space, following different prompts to change speed and taking notice of each other
Sticky feedback: Free writing exercise on stickiness of personal experiences with Feedback
Mapping: Create individual and collective maps of feedback experience(s)
Hands-on glue making
Hijacking the glue
Body voting: Collective decision making on how to approach the billboard
Billboard exercise: Activating the glue on the billboard As the finishing act of the two-day workshop, Lila Bullen-Smith, an artist, designer and Sandberg Instituut alum, prepared and facilitated a delicious, sticky dinner, which served as an act of collective reflection and sharing. Lila is a member of the Brackish Collective, which explores food as a medium for storytelling and socio-ecological inquiry. They employ hosting, tasting, and eating rituals as alternative tools for accessing socio-political knowledge embedded in our environment. Their work often involves site-specific research, leading to immersive installations and performances that invite audiences to engage with the history of particular ecological sites.

Lila proposed the meal as an extension of the workshop’s themes of material-based engagement, exploring the stickiness of social gatherings over food and drawing a connection to the GLUE. The dinner featured a recipe-writing exercise, where the participants wrote and exchanged recipes as a form of “feedback,” aligning the act of sharing food with the workshop’s process. These contributions were gathered and are compiled into a small cookbook here.

Beyond the recipes, the dinner itself was designed as a participatory experience, drawing attention to the textures, flavors, and labor of cooking as sites of material exploration. We had bread and butter, artichoke with preserved lemon, mayonnaise, onion galette, salt-baked beetroot with whipped ricotta, apple and hazelnuts, salt-baked carrots with orange-butter and sage, drunken prunes, and rice pudding. We drank blackberry and fennel soda, and strawberry and verbena soda on the side.

Anja Groten and Márk Redele

Hi, and welcome Elioa and Szymon. Could you introduce yourselves once more and tell us about your backgrounds, and also the background of IPOP?

**Elioa Steffens **

I’m Elioa Steffens. I’m from the U.S., which I think has a significant impact on how I engage with art, education, and particularly with IPOP.

My mother worked at a theater, and I started participating when I was eight. I continued consistently throughout high school, where I also became involved in youth organizing, primarily focused on addressing harassment targeting LGBTQ students in my community. This work was a kind of return to community for me. I grew up on an island and left for high school due to the harassment I experienced at 13 or 14. When I found activism, I felt that if I was going to critique my community, I also needed to support efforts to change it.

The organization I joined was entirely youth-run. We had one adult employee, but the board consisted entirely of young people under 22. There was a strong emphasis on empowerment, facilitation, and learning how to hold space and lead meetings. It was highly educational, though at the time, we rarely used terms like “education” or “pedagogy.” This has been important in shaping my approach to IPOP. I’ve always approached education somewhat sideways to the institution, in that I’m deeply aware of politics, systemic structures, and their impact on people, but never seen education as a rigid, nine-to-five system with structured classes and curricula.

In college, I studied theater and explored ideas of community, which has always been a central interest of mine. Afterward, I joined an organization that used the arts to provide life skills and empowerment for teenagers. During this period, my artistic engagement shifted from focusing on production, product, and craft to centering on affect and the craft of facilitation, with art serving as a tool rather than an aesthetic goal.

I was trained in a facilitation approach called the Creative Communities modality, which placed a strong emphasis on mastery, developing high-level skill in facilitation. This has been a key influence on my work with IPOP. From the beginning, we were clear that we wouldn’t hire artists who didn’t know how to give workshops. We don’t assume that being an artist automatically means knowing how to educate. Many artists are also skilled educators, but these are distinct skill sets. I wasn’t interested in the model where an artist simply presents their work to students and calls it education—especially when they’re not good at it, and plenty aren’t.

Another important aspect of IPOP’s development, and something we’ve been reflecting on recently, is how idiosyncratic our methodology is. It’s shaped by who we are as people, and that’s significant. This extends to the people we co-research with, the participants we engage with, and those we’ve brought in through various collaborations. It’s a deeply personal approach—whether that’s beautiful or not is up for debate, but it’s worth acknowledging.

Shall I introduce IPOP?

Yes, that would be great.

We are an educational artistic research project, posing two key questions: How do we support queer people in the academy to advance? And how do we support the education of queer artists? While much of our focus has been on students, we have also been deeply interested in supporting staff and teachers, aiming for a more holistic understanding of what it means to create, to think of an audience within the educational frame, a queer audience.

And then the other part of it was the question how this work of supporting queer individuals within the academy and arts education contributes to the broader landscape of arts education itself. While we initially worked within academic institutions for structural and funding reasons, we have always been interested in breaking down the division between the academy and the larger ecosystem that supports artists beyond it. Over time, we have expanded our work into residency spaces, festivals, and collaborations with individual artists, often acting as dramaturgs and facilitators.

In our first year, we ran several programs, including workshops, a reading group, and what became known as the queer feedback sessions. These sessions evolved into a seven-week program (spread over non-consecutive weeks) in which a cohort of queer artists came together to share their work and provide feedback. We developed an experimental approach to feedback—creating individualized, need-based protocols tailored to each artist and session.

At the heart of this work is the belief that feedback should be fundamentally and necessarily for the artist. Within the IPOP model, feedback time is structured to serve the artist’s needs first, allowing them to shape the process in ways that truly support their creative practice.

We have also used this work to critique and reflect on how the academy functions, as well as the broader ecosystem that supports artists, including the ways in which it doesn’t work. So, I wonder about what minor interventions we can make.

Márk Redele

Szymon, do you want to introduce yourself as well?

**Szymon Adamczak **

I’m Szymon Adamczak, my work exists at a crossroads—blending and engaging with resources and knowledge from the U.S., Poland, and the Netherlands, where our project is based. This transnational exchange of queer thought and artistic practice has been central to IPOP, shaping our approach and expanding the project’s intellectual and creative foundations.

I did not initially train as an artist. I entered the theater world as a self-taught practitioner, which was a formative experience—observing both sides of the stage, analyzing audience reactions, and understanding the dynamic feedback loop between performance and spectatorship. My early work was shaped by a liberal arts education, community organizing, and involvement in civic movements in Poland before I eventually professionalized within theater and performance-making. My first formal art school experience was at DAS Theatre in Amsterdam.

This period coincided with a time of intense political conservatism in Poland, marked by openly anti-LGBTQ+ policies. Living abroad, I felt a strong personal and collective need to understand queer identity and the social and political repercussions that came with it. These experiences deeply influenced the ideas I have brought into IPOP—particularly the urgency of community survival and the belief that rather than waiting for institutional support, we must create our own networks of care.

Another key influence on my work has been HIV activism, which intersects with education in meaningful ways. While studying I was diagnosed and I became engaged with learning about the history of HIV/AIDS activism. However, I quickly realized that much of this knowledge was absent from art schools and had to be sought outside academic institutions. This gap underscored the necessity of IPOP for me—the dream of a space where queer pedagogies and embodied knowledge could have a presence within the academy. Knowing that LGBTQ+ students exist within these spaces, it felt essential to cultivate an environment that acknowledges and addresses their specific needs.

My practice now revolves around dramaturgy and artistic research, and IPOP serves as a way to bridge artistic research and pedagogy, in which I treat education as an extension of artistic practice.

I see IPOP not just as an educational research project; it is an evolving practice that critically examines and intervenes in institutional structures. A significant part of our work involves tracing the lasting effects of different feedback modalities—understanding how they live in artists’ bodies and how they shape artistic development over time.

Through IPOP, we make space for these embodied experiences, incorporating a somatic awareness in our approach. We frequently collaborate with choreographers who help us explore these dynamics through movement and bodily engagement. A core aspect of our methodology is co-designing individualized feedback protocols with artists, ensuring they have agency in shaping their learning experiences. Through this, we hope to empower artists and help them reflect on past experiences, build nuance in their practice, and develop the confidence to effectively articulate and advocate for what they need.

Ultimately, IPOP is about more than just feedback. It is about creating a sustainable framework for queer artistic education, fostering self-determined learning, and ensuring that queer voices are heard and supported within and beyond the academy.

A key point that resonates with me is the blurred line between artist and educator. For a long time, it was simply taken for granted that artists could also be educators. But we’ve had to come to terms—sometimes painfully—with the reality that teaching is a skill in its own right, and artistic ability alone does not automatically translate into effective pedagogy.

Recently, however, more artists view facilitation and education as integral to their practice rather than a separate role. While financial necessity once pushed artists towards teaching, many now embrace pedagogy not just for income but as a meaningful extension of their art and design practices.

I think I both agree and disagree. I’m not entirely convinced by the economic argument. In fact, I’d say the financial situation for artists has become even more precarious, pushing more of us into education out of necessity. Many artists I know who teach do so not because they see it as an extension of their practice, but simply because it’s one of the few ways to earn a stable income. As a result, teaching has become a much larger part of what we actually do on a daily basis.

That said, I’ve noticed a shift in how artists approach education. In the past, some would lead workshops focused mainly on their own work, and only occasionally engaged with students—essentially just sharing their practice without much consideration for pedagogy. I see less of that now. That’s less common. Cultural expectations have also changed—there’s less tolerance for the “grand artist” persona, where someone teaches without any real responsibility to students. I’ve even seen artists show up intoxicated, but such behavior once excused by status or reputation is far less acceptable today.

Yes, exactly. One of the core aspects of IPOP is the development of custom-made feedback methodologies, tailored to the needs of each artist. Rather than applying a one-size-fits-all approach, we work closely with artists to understand what they are actually seeking in their practice and what kind of feedback would be most useful to them.

An example that comes to mind is when we collaborated with an artist whose work was deeply rooted in somatic experience. Traditional critique sessions, where discussion is primarily verbal and analytical, weren’t particularly helpful for them. Instead, we designed a feedback structure that prioritized embodied responses—where participants engaged physically with aspects of the work before reflecting on it in words. This shift allowed the artist to gain insights that resonated more with their process, rather than being forced into an external framework of evaluation.

In this way, facilitation and artistic practice merge, as the learning space itself becomes an extension of the artist’s creative inquiry. By embedding feedback methodologies within artistic practice rather than imposing them from the outside, we try to create a space where artists can refine their work on their own terms while still benefiting from collective reflection.

A key part of our approach is questioning the supposed universality of feedback and facilitation methods. There isn’t a single recipe that works for everyone, and we’ve consciously chosen to diverge from established models—such as the DAS Theatre feedback system, which has certainly influenced us, but which we also felt the need to move beyond. Our focus is on following the needs of artists as they arise, embracing experimentation, and seeing each feedback session as an opportunity to learn rather than a rigid structure to be applied universally.

One of the crucial aspects of this process is recognizing how power dynamics operate within a learning space. Facilitation, even when thoughtfully executed, can still reinforce hierarchies or allow certain voices to dominate. That’s why we place such emphasis on fostering an environment where feedback is reciprocal, where authorship and authority can be questioned, and where learning happens collectively rather than being centered solely on the advancement of individual artists. We aim to create a space where contributions can be picked up, reshaped, and expanded by others—where knowledge circulates rather than being owned.

This becomes especially significant in a performance context, where embodiment plays a crucial role. A strong example of this came from our work at SNDO over the past two years. One artist we worked with was exploring grief in their choreography, and instead of offering verbal critique, the group engaged in an embodied response. Participants shared the ways they personally grieve—through movement, through specific gestures, through bodily expressions of loss. This process allowed the artist to learn not just through discussion but through direct experience, by witnessing and engaging with the many ways grief manifests physically. In moments like this, feedback goes beyond analysis; it becomes a form of shared expression, a deeply generative and transformative exchange.

It seems so obvious now that how we share feedback is just as important as what we share—the information itself. For example, the idea of whispering feedback is really interesting. In this case, the artist is working with whispering as a research subject and is able to turn it into a feedback methodology. The feedback methodology and the moment of sharing then become an extension of the work, while offering new insights.

I find this example inspiring, not because I’m specifically working on this topic, but because it serves as a reminder for me as an educator that we can’t just settle for our methods. It’s not about standardizing a best practice. I think with IPOP, there’s been a resistance to creating set “recipes” for feedback that others can just adopt. However, I also find it really helpful to hear concrete examples. In our process I particularly enjoyed going through some exercises with you, writing them down, and thinking about how they can be adapted or used in different contexts.

I’d be curious to hear more about your thoughts on feedback methods—how they can be disseminated and moved between different contexts, how they might be shared across various environments.

We’re working on a book, and in it we make a distinction between techniques and methods. Loosely, techniques are activities, while methods are more about structure and philosophies. I mention this because I find myself curious about the extent to which methods can be shared. There are definitely aspects of methods that can be shared, like the questions we ask and the value system we engage with. No skill is uniquely ours—neither of us hold any skills that others can’t learn. But I do think that much of how we share methods is through a description of context, who we are, our skills, the questions we ask, the values we hold, and the outcomes we’ve had. It’s kind of a real desire to ask: hey, what is actually true for you, and where do you know?
As for techniques, I think they’re actually quite shareable. In the book, we’re writing out a lot of techniques in a “how-to” format. What’s interesting is how the techniques and methods can meld. I’m curious about how this will work in the book and maybe something we should revisit. In some of the ways we encourage people to play with the techniques, we’re also sharing the method. We’re saying, “This is how we do it,” but pointing out the places where there’s flexibility. Of course, people can adapt them as they wish, but we’re trying to show that a technique can take 20 minutes or two hours, and it can work with one person or a group of 50, and here’s how it might look in each case.

In terms of sharing methods, prompts, and community knowledge, we’re also guided by feminist principles and lineages, right? We strive to uncover where we learned from, who taught us something, and what we do with that knowledge. We aim to show that our practices are not about inventing the wheel but rather building on a continuity of ideas and teachings. However, we also challenge the notion of authorship and the idea of “trademarking” knowledge. Instead, we seek ways for these practices to circulate, be picked up, and adapted by others.

There’s also a tension I feel, especially coming from Eastern Europe, regarding the use of terms like “feedback” and “performance.” These words are often tied to business, capitalism, and productivity, which can complicate their usage, especially in contexts outside of the West or Global North. For instance, when translating or exporting ideas from the Global North into other contexts with different historical developments or cultural traditions, there’s a risk of positioning these ideas as superior. I’ve noticed this, especially when teaching in Poland, where the theater culture differs significantly. The discourse around feedback, for example, can take on a different agenda for younger artists. For them, feedback can become a system that protects students from violence or top-down authority, acting as a mediator between students and professors.

Additionally, we’re listening and learning from global movements, like Black Lives Matter and Palestinian solidarity movements. These movements, along with the broader calls for body autonomy, influence our thinking. We’re aware of how the external world is reflected in the classroom, and how facilitation plays a role in addressing these issues in our teaching and practices.

We invited you to work with us, to engage in conversations and develop workshop situations together. Our starting point was material-based research and education, embodied forms of knowledge production, and learning. One key element of our research trajectory was to really focus on the workshops as sites of material inquiry but also as social environments in which knowledge is shared. We felt that this aspect of art and design education is sometimes neglected. It’s crucial to students’ development, yet there can be a lack of appreciation for what happens in these spaces.

We proposed collaborating with IPOP and developing a workshop together with the Bookbinding Workshop (BB) at GerritRietveld Academie. Márk, can you recall why we chose this particular workshop? It may not seem like the most obvious choice at first glance. For someone unfamiliar with our bookbinding workshop, it might seem surprising.

We were interested in BB because of its focus on producing personal toolsets, which are primarily designed as educational tools but also serve specific purposes for bookbinding techniques and other publication-making practices. The BB team develops DIY methods for creating solutions that can be shared openly, allowing students to create their own tools. This enables them to set up their own emerging studios or workshops, where they can produce books or publications at very low cost and in an accessible manner.

We were intrigued by how the methodology of creating these toolsets facilitates communal, material-based knowledge sharing. It’s collaborative in nature, focused on openness and making things open-source. Additionally, it relies heavily on iterative learning, where students test tools, learn from the outcomes, and refine their methods.

Another reason we were drawn to BB was its ability to simultaneously engage with both the materiality of a book and the content it holds. This intersection of material and text is exciting, as it allows for the exploration of both physical craft and conceptual content in one practice.

BB, in many ways, challenges the boundaries typically established by institutions. They push and question assumptions about where the workshop production should take place. BB have expanded beyond these infrastructural confines of their space—they work across different spaces, other workshops, classrooms, intervene with students in the library, and they even travel internationally to share their practice in other art academies abroad, i.e. recently Yale in New Haven and Tufts University in Boston. Through these activities, they’ve developed a unique collective practice that goes far beyond just being a service provider sitting in a workshop, waiting for students to come by with their questions.

A key focus of both BB and IPOP seems to be on empowerment and it was really rewarding to see how that took place in the workshop we facilitated together. It felt like a mutually empowering experience for both students and facilitators. I am curious about your experience working with the BB workshop. I’m sure there were surprises or unexpected moments in the process. I’m just really eager to hear about what it was like for you, both in terms of the preparation and how the sessions unfolded.

In my experience working with BB, I found them to be deeply conceptual and it made me confront my assumptions about craft-based work and conceptual work. Maybe that distinction is artificial. My experience working with them was really interesting and quite different from how I usually work. There were definitely moments of faith—just going with it and seeing how things unfolded.

I also find it fascinating to think about education in terms of outcomes. How do we define the value of education? Is it tied to a specific result or effect? Looking back, what really stood out to me was how enjoyable and abundant the process felt. That abundance is something worth highlighting. In many of our teaching experiences, we work in pairs, which is relatively unique. But even then, it can feel like you have to be “on” the entire time, fully engaged. Working solo can heighten that feeling.

In contrast, having seven leaders in this context created moments of ease. There were times when I could just play with glue and chat with people, which felt different from the usual structure. It also influenced our values around non-hierarchical structures in an interesting way. Not only did we talk about being equal, but we were actually engaging in the same activities—experimenting together, side by side. That shift created more space for true non-hierarchy than I’ve experienced in many other programs.

In most teaching moments, even when I’m actively participating, I always have one eye on the bigger picture—making sure everything is running smoothly. But in this setting, I could let go of that for a while and then step back into it. There was also something inherently generous about the materials and equipment. BB, in particular, had tools they could share freely, which was beautiful. There’s something special about cutting paper, seeing the physicality of it, and working with those tangible materials.

First of all, it was a really great experience collaborating with the BB team. The vibe they bring, their groove, I really love their way of working. When they shared their projects and interventions, I found that really inspiring. For example, the way they responded to the COVID-19 situation with a WhatsApp phone hotline or the mobile bookbindings toolkits in bags they created for people to take. Those were really thoughtful gestures.

It was also important to witness different approaches to workshop preparation. We tend to be more conceptual, working with scores and duration, focusing on the experiential aspect. In contrast, with bookbinding, the material itself seemed to dictate what was being experienced, which was an interesting shift. What I really enjoyed was how we all allowed the process to take the lead in our exchange. There was this tension between the process and working with a specific, historically significant site—the mural, the billboard—that had been chosen by the BB team as the format we work towards.

I also found it exciting how multilayered the inputs were. We had a historical presentation on the billboard, our own presentations, discussions, and the team’s contributions. It created this multi-directional flow of information. I hope it didn’t overwhelm the students, but rather encouraged them to follow what interested them most.

Later in the process, even though we were working professionally, things started to materialize organically. There were moments of uncertainty, like, how do we step back? Who is doing what? But that openness and trust in the process were really valuable. There wasn’t a strict division of labor; instead, things happened voluntarily and spontaneously. I really enjoyed observing these micro-interactions, whether it was people meeting over the glue, the mapping sheet, the billboard, or even by the microwave. There were so many of these small but meaningful exchanges.

One of the most powerful parts for me was the body voting. As IPOP, we had never used it so extensively before. It was fun, exciting, and sometimes exhausting seeing how decisions played out, how aesthetic choices were debated. That whole process, the complexity of it, was really revealing. It became an interesting act in itself, regardless of the final outcome.

Lastly, from the perspective of IPOP, I really appreciated the status of the BB workshop within the institution. It’s a team that is rooted in the building, and serves students, alumni, and others. There’s something about that kind of space-making that we don’t necessarily have in the same way, since our activities are structured differently and more spread out. It was nice to tap into that.

I’d like to add something about disciplinarity and anti-disciplinarity and how, to me, there seems to be a connection between facilitation and feedback methodologies that can guide us from one to the other—or rather, from one territory to another. This became particularly clear to me throughout this workshop.

When I think about conventional disciplines—architecture, for example, which is my background, but also performance or graphic design—the typical modes of interrogation, often referred to as feedback in education, tend to focus on identifying what aspects of a student’s or participant’s work don’t belong to the discipline. There’s a lot of negation involved, a process of filtering out elements deemed unnecessary in order to maintain a narrowly defined tradition at the core of that field.

What I experienced in this workshop, however, through the feedback methods you introduced, was a completely different approach—one that felt incredibly generous and inclusive, considering every contribution without exclusion. And because of that, by the end, it almost became impossible to define exactly what discipline we were left with.

Even though we started with a clear framework—a bookbinding workshop, working with the glue and publications—once we engaged with these feedback methodologies, the boundaries of that discipline began to dissolve. Not in the sense that the foundation disappeared, but rather that a transformation took place.

This process clarified for me what we mean when we talk about anti-disciplinarity as something desirable or valuable. There’s a clear dynamic between disciplinarity and anti-disciplinarity, as well as between conventional interrogation techniques and alternative feedback methodologies. I sense a meaningful relationship here, one that shifts how we understand and navigate disciplines.

I think it might also be related to the fact that we didn’t work on a book in the traditional sense. The book wasn’t the central focus; instead, it was the glue that was the focus and held everything together, metaphorically and literally. This shift opens up all sorts of other possibilities. Usually, glue is a material that isn’t meant to be noticeable—it’s there to serve a specific function, but you don’t spend much time thinking about what type of glue you’re using. When that becomes the main focus, it helps break down some of these disciplinary assumptions.

At the same time, I’m really curious about how this workshop would have looked if we had considered a book as the goal.

I know a lot of folks often feel the need to defend their placement within a discipline. This seems to be especially important in the Netherlands. Coming from the U.S., it feels wild to me because we don’t have the same kind of funding, so it doesn’t matter as much whether you call yourself a visual artist or a performance artist. Here, however, it’s a more defensible position—if you want funding from the Dutch government, for example, you really need to prove that you are a visual artist.

I think this also applies, though to a lesser extent, to the performing arts. This idea connects to the concept of queering. For us, it’s not that discipline isn’t important, but we want to be really clear about why and how we choose that identity. It’s not that we don’t care about discipline, but we don’t let it limit us. We come from the performing arts, but we’ve had visual artists and filmmakers participate as well. Discipline isn’t a barrier for participation, but it does matter in some ways—we consider it when thinking about how we show up in relation to the work and what it means. We think about the histories of those modalities, but we don’t want to say that discipline is never important. In some contexts, it actually is incredibly important, especially in terms of career advancement.

What you’re saying about finding ways to lessen the importance of strict discipline boundaries is really beautiful, because it allows for more choice and a recognition of how limiting it can be. It also opens up a space where we can point out the absurdity of certain moments when discipline becomes important for reasons that don’t really make sense. Personally, I think I’ve been fairly clear about wanting to think in a multidisciplinary way, but I know classmates and peers in other institutions where this issue is a key factor in evaluation. It’s not uncommon to hear, “We don’t know how to evaluate you because you don’t fit within a clear discipline.”

To push back against that, on both a political and values level, it feels important to ask, “Why is this the case?” It’s messed up, unless you’re really trying to teach something about how you engage with a system that upholds such boundaries. I think that’s something I appreciated about this workshop. I’m also curious what it would have been like if we had actually set out to make a book and what kind of book we would have made. For me, there’s also this interesting tension that emerged in the group about whether or not we were making a coherent product. Many participants struggled with the idea that the outcome was so amorphous and were uncertain whether it would be valuable to an audience. It made me think about how, sometimes, we might not even know the value of something until later.

**Who? **

What you said earlier about abundance really resonates with me. Normally, as an educator, I’m in charge and feel responsible for running the show, making sure everything’s in motion. But this time, I felt very grateful to be with my students in a different way. A lot of the people joining were students I work with every week, and I could engage with them without having to be the one in charge. It allowed me to encounter their way of working and thinking in a completely different way.

It’s always my goal when I teach to create a space without hierarchies, where we all share the responsibility of holding that space. But still, there’s a difference between joining in as a participant and encountering the students during an exercise like the one you led. Walking around the room and sharing intimate stories with each other was a unique experience. The body voting exercise was also incredible. It gave me important insights and material to think about and continue working with, especially regarding how we make choices.

A lot of the time, we make choices based on past education, but putting it on the spot like that was something different. Usually, we talk about work after there’s something to discuss, but here, we were all trying to figure out what we were going to create and how to articulate our intentions for creation, what is important to us. The role of the billboard was crucial in this process because it was public, which made it feel like a responsibility. It wasn’t something you could just throw together. I had imagined people might just work with it without much discussion, but there was a clear sense of needing to be sure about our choices since it was going to be public.

I’m also curious, as educators running a multi-workshop program, what you sensed from your students. What do you think happened for them? What did they say about the experience?

It seemed to me that the students felt like they were part of something really special, and it seemed very precious to them—not just in terms of the experience itself, but also in the content of what they were exploring.

They had the opportunity to zoom in on how they learn, to ask themselves, “What do I need?” They had a chance to figure that out for themselves and to develop the language to express it. That preparation will be valuable as they enter their upcoming classes and meetings with tutors, giving them more agency in their own learning. I can still feel the impact of that session with the first-years, and I think they did too. Having that space to talk amongst themselves was important.

It was also a rare opportunity for them to meet the workshop facilitators in such an in-depth way. Normally, they just get a tour of the workshops and are left to find their way. But having [forgotten name] from the silk-screen workshop present the billboard and its history was really special. And beyond that, simply getting to work with people for a longer period made a huge difference.

Speaking about abundance, it felt like such a special moment to have several interesting educators and facilitators around, who were truly present for and with the students. That’s not something we usually do, and I think a lot of that has to do with the scarcity of resources. But it really stood out. I think this was true for the other workshops as well. Bringing people together from different departments and disciplines is so rare, yet it was clear how much everyone appreciated learning from each other, not just as students but as facilitators and educators too. That kind of cross-learning is something we don’t often make space for, but when we do, it’s incredibly valuable.

One thing that really stood out to me, and touched me deeply, was how, in most individual projects, a person’s executive functioning often determines how successfully they can take on a challenge. But in this workshop, from the very beginning, I saw a different dynamic emerge. There was such a generous, communal aspect—not just in terms of sharing resources, but also in the kind of attentiveness and gentleness required to navigate these feedback methods. This created an environment where people became increasingly comfortable throughout the day, feeling empowered to take initiative and make decisions on their own. That was incredibly special to witness, and I think it’s extremely valuable, especially in a setting where improving that kind of confidence and agency can be quite difficult.

And on another note, though we joked about the dinner, I overheard a first-year student say, “This is the first proper meal I’ve had since arriving in Amsterdam.” That really stuck with me because, for many people, that’s a reality. Creating these generous spaces, where care and nourishment extend beyond just the learning process, has a real impact—not just in the moment, but in a broader, developmental sense as well.

Wow, that dinner was amazing!

It was really delicious. I’m still thinking about it!

I’m really grateful for the experience, it was great to be a part of it. The people who came from outside were really valuable to the dynamic. There were only a couple, but they made a big impact

The dinner was really beautiful, and it made me think about something we try to focus on—something that Szymon, you often bring up better than I do—the importance of addressing basic needs, like food, water, and breaks. It’s easy to overlook these things, especially when we’re creating a space that feels caring. But having snacks and a meal like that is such a huge part of creating that atmosphere. For me, sometimes I forget, in the hustle of my own material and social life, that not everyone has access to what I might take for granted. For some people, this could have been their only or most significant meal of the day, and I’m reminded of that.

Thank you for this reminder.

This feels like a natural moment to wrap up. Thank you so much for both of you.

Speaking out loud with fungi

## Speaking out loud with fungi

**## A conversation with Sam Edens **

In this conversation, Anja and Márk invited Sam Edens to join them in a collective recollection of, and reflection on, the workshop “Entangled Fibers: Grey Oyster experiment.” The event brought together the students of the TXT department, the Garden Department, the HvA Biomaterials Studio, and the Design Department, as well as other living organisms.

Sam Edens (HvA) is a bio-designer and researcher with experience working with bio-based and living materials such as fungi, algae, yeasts, and bacteria. The workshop guided students in cultivating Grey Oyster fungal threads on substrates of decaying materials from the garden. The collaboration between the TXT department, the Garden Department, and Sam’s expertise aimed to foreground how knowledge emerges from the interplay of materials and the environment in a collective, material-discursive setting. With theory intermissions by Giulia Damiani (theory tutor at TXT), and workshop specialist Mathilde Clerc, we explored how material-based research can resonate in collective learning and embodied forms of knowledge production.

**Workshop outline: **

9:30–10:00

Gathering in the Garden

Introductions by Sam, Anja, and Mark

Presentation and tour by the Garden Department

Giulia introduces first thoughts on relevant theoretical frameworks

10:00–11:00

Collecting materials for growing substrate from the garden

11:00–13:00

Lab safety and creating sterile working environments, work in close space (with view on the garden), led by Sam

Intermission 1 with Giulia

13:00–14:00 Lunch break

14:00–15:30

Intermission 2 with Giulia 15–30 min

Working in closed space (with view on the garden), led by Sam

15:30-45

(If there is time: Intermission 3 with Giulia 15–30 min)
Wrap up

16.00–17.00

Cleaning, sterilising

Giulia’s thoughts about the theory intermissions:

I’m very keen to take part and I’ll join in! I’m thinking my contribution could take the form of 3 extracts from texts that I’ll pick and that we can read together in 3 different moments, and I could prepare 3 questions that can spark conversation in the group. Each moment can last like 15-30 min.

Anja Groten Sam, we thought it would be nice to have a conversation not too long after our workshop to recollect and reflect on the experience, and perhaps follow up on some of the questions that came up. The invitation for you to join and develop a workshop alongside the TXT department came from our shared interest in exploring materiality and material-based research through the lens of living organisms and unstable matter. We also wanted to think about the laboratory as a space, both conceptually and practically, especially since we don’t have access to such a space within our academy. A lab feels like a more controlled and sterile environment compared to a typical art school workshop for instance, yet these spaces share some similarities, for instance the experimental character of the activities that take place in them.

We were particularly interested in how to navigate such a lab space in an educational context and in your experience with that. In our preparatory sessions, we considered materials that were interesting both physically and conceptually for a workshop setting.

We’d love to hear more from you—about your work, and how you established the Biodesign lab.

Sam Edens My job mainly involves coordinating the Biomaterials Studio, teaching about biomaterials in the minor Sustainable Futures and other programs, and working with living organisms. I also spend two days a week as a researcher in the Circular Architecture Research Group, focusing on bio-based and regenerative building materials. My work is split between the technical properties of materials and designing with living organisms and bio-based materials.

In the Biomaterials Studio, we essentially run a community bio lab. It’s open to students, researchers, and lecturers, but in practice, it requires someone to assist, which can be challenging with the small budgets we have available. During classes, I teach students how to work with different organisms, emphasizing the need for safety, protocols, and understanding each organism’s specific needs. Another focus is developing new materials that could replace fossil-based plastics—something very experimental, but it’s particularly appealing to students at a fashion school.

When you say experimental, do you mean that something is not necessarily for immediate application or immediate use for the industry? Rather than solving problems, it’s about seeing what can be done through a process of trial and error?

Well, the Amsterdam University of Applied Science (AUAS) trains students to work in the industry. I work specifically with students from design fields like fashion. Our lab is small, so the work we do is experimental and not scaled for commercial bio-based material production, like mycelium leather or bacterial dyes, which are produced at an industrial scale. I mean, there’s a huge difference between what we can do in a lab and actual industrial-level bio-fabrication.

However, to understand industrial processes, you need some knowledge of microbiology and design. I aim to help them understand processes of how to fabricate these materials,

how the fields of microbiology and design intersect, even though we can’t replicate industrial bio-fabrication in our lab. In a design school, working with living organisms and regenerative materials is more about exploration—how to collaborate with organisms and create materials together.

In industry, bio-fabrication and bio-engineering focus on genetic modification, and optimizing and isolating organisms. The vocabulary and skills involved are quite different. When I teach design students about working with living materials, I’m introducing them to the practice and its vocabulary. However, I don’t have the resources to fully train them for bio-fabrication; that requires a separate program. My goal is to ensure they can have meaningful conversations with microbiologists and bioengineers.

In our workshop, we involved Giulia Damiani, who is a writer, researcher, theater-maker, and theory teacher at TXT. Giulia introduced the theoretical concept of new materialism and how artists relate to fungi. She highlighted the growing interest in these organisms in the arts, noting their uncontrollable nature and ability to thrive in damaged environments. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing has been read and discussed a lot in the field of arts and design. Mycelium’s unstable characteristics have sparked the curiosity of many artists, not only as a material but also in how we engage with art in more fundamental terms. Given your experience, Sam, I’m curious if you’ve observed this trend as well. Why are artists and designers increasingly drawn to mycelium? Beyond the practical benefits of regenerative materials and reducing waste, there seems to be a more philosophical or fundamental fascination with mycelium.

Well, if you start working with living organisms you have to rethink what a material actually is. Unlike traditional materials, which are controllable and passive, living materials require a different approach. It’s another type of relationship you build with the material, one that allows for a sort of dialogue. Working with living materials challenges how we relate to materiality, especially in environments like AUAS. You know, when we are talking about wood we tend to talk about functionality. But we’re not really talking about its behavior and the way it interacts as an active agent. New materialism discusses material agency, and when working with living organisms, that agency becomes undeniable and experiential. It forces you to adjust your approach, which can be both fascinating and frustrating, but ultimately, it changes the way we interact with materials in a way that other materials don’t.

Márk RedeleI’ve been thinking about the situatedness of these materials and how they’re often removed from their original context when they are brought into labs. The shift toward new materialisms seems to reflect a desire to reconnect with the environments where these materials come from. It’s about exploring where they live and the conditions that allow them to maintain the properties we’re interested in. Maybe that resonates?

Yeah, looking back at, for instance, the minor in Sustainable Futures that I have been coordinating together with Ista Boszhard (co-founder of TextileLab, Waag), I think our workshop captured what we aim to do there as well—practical work with organisms alongside philosophical discussions. In the minor we also focus on critical thinking and reflection, helping students who want to work with materials differently and perhaps engage with it more critically, but don’t know where to start. A question we are interested in is how to engage more critically with material while industries may not seem aligned with our values. This combination of hands-on material work and understanding its broader context helps students bridge gaps between thinking and making. Many students in the minor are frustrated with the system and thinking in dualistic terms, but by offering strategies to connect these ideas, they begin to relax into their practice and things start flowing again.

The workshop highlighted interesting contradictions and tensions. We’re working with living organisms, which are uncontrollable and act as their own agents. As artists and designers, we have to step back and be humble about our influence on them, and let them do their thing. At the same time, we create highly controlled environments to understand something far more complex than we can perceive. There’s also the contrast between the collective learning taking place in the garden of Gerrit Rietveld Academie for instance—where knowledge is passed down across generations and seasons—and the more sterile, though not perfectly sterile, lab environment. Another tension is the pressure students face to meet deadlines and pass exams, which contrasts with the slower, more organic process of working with living materials. These different tempos often don’t align.

I see a similar tension in education. Some programs emphasize a conceptual approach, so students focus on the look and feel of a material without considering its ingredients or properties. In other programs, there’s more focus on the end product, and students treat material development as just a step toward that result. This can be frustrating, especially with living materials, where growth takes time and often doesn’t go right the first time. I try to focus on material research in my programs, making it process-driven rather than result-driven. I encourage students to see each step as part of the learning process and to tell the story of that process. In graduation projects, I’ve seen students working harder than others, making and dyeing materials with bacteria, only to be criticized for the end result, which is rarely under their control. When working with living organisms, you must shift your focus to the process and accept that you can’t control everything.

It’s fascinating. I am thinking about the experience of students entering any type of workshop really—whether it’s glass, printmaking, bookbinding, metal, or ceramics. Sometimes students senter these workshops or lab spaces with a lot of stress. Navigating that stress in the lab can be tricky, I assume. Many educators in more production-based spaces face a mismatch in expectations among themselves, the students, and the tutors—who are often far removed from the hands-on experience but who assess the work. Students often have their own prefabricated expectations, and it’s frustrating when the process doesn’t align with those. But it can also be immensely rewarding when you allow the process to teach you something, letting things emerge and evolve. When it comes to biomaterials, this is even more pronounced, as you can’t predict the outcome and the timeline can be long—sometimes leading to no results at all, or results that are unexpected or not what you wanted.

I always hope that students can have the time to sort of “meet” a material or process. For example, I have students working on making fabrics from pine needles—a process that you won’t do right the first time. It requires several attempts to understand certain details. You need at least three or four turns to understand the cooking time, but they’re often not allowing themselves this space. They’re too focused on the end product and don’t allow themselves the time to explore the process, which only leads to frustration. I can’t solve this for them and it’s hard to shift their mindset, as they’re used to immediate results. It’s like working with wood or clay—you can’t just jump in and expect success right away. We’re so accustomed to instant results that we forget material exploration takes time. Working with living materials forces you to take that time because it’s not bending to your temporality. They can’t rush the process.

Right, I’ve been thinking about how specific pedagogies evolve in different material contexts. Teaching methods can be closely tied to the materials and equipment we work with. One thing I found inspiring and plan to incorporate into my own classes is the practice of vocalizing what you’re doing. If I remember correctly, this approach stems from a safety concern, but I’d love for you to explain it further. How did you come across this idea, or is it something you developed? How do you practice vocalization in the lab?

The practice of vocalizing what you’re doing became important when my colleague Loes Bogers and I had interns, who were all following their individual processes. It helped them understand why a protocol is crucial. A protocol involves going through all the steps and risks before working with a living organism, ensuring safety. Speaking out loud helps them think through their actions and ensures they understand the risks, like working with fire or gas. It’s also a way to confirm they’ve grasped the instructions and fosters learning from each other. Instead of me repeating corrections, students hear the same information multiple times. Additionally, because we often work with hazardous materials, vocalizing what you’re doing helps ensure everyone is aware and prepared for any risks, which promotes better collaboration.

We are usually working together in the lab. That’s why it’s important that every movement is conscious. If you’re not telling somebody what you’re doing, they won’t be prepared if something happens. So it’s also a way of making sure that everybody is collaborating well, and knows and pays attention to what is happening.

Márk and I have been reflecting on the dichotomy between thinking and making. Everyone within the academy seems to agree that there should be no differentiation between material production, the making, and the conceptualization and reflection of that process, but there are few tools or formats to support that constant dialogue. We bridged these modalities by inviting Giulia to introduce texts, but the reading still felt somewhat separate. I wonder if the vocalization exercise could be applied to other forms of making—not just for safety, but as an attempt to articulate something embodied and make it accessible to others. Sometimes it seems there is a resistance to explaining a process, because it might demystify the artistic process. However, just describing what you’re doing can lead to new insights, even if no one else is listening. There’s something valuable in making the effort to explicate your process, as it creates a possibility for knowledge to become shareable.

**MR **

This reminds me of a technique called “pointing and calling,” which originates from Japanese railway safety practices. It involves pointing and verbally calling out each step of the maintenance process to engage multiple senses and ensure heightened attention to detail in the moment.

Yes, this exercise really shifts attention. Even though I know what the students will say, my focus as an educator also remains intense because they’re all vocalizing it. If they weren’t, I’d likely zone out after the second student takes their turn, especially if I’m tired. This shows how much the vocalization helps keep everyone engaged, including myself, and I think it helps the students stay more involved in the process too.

The way I experienced it, the exercise also gave students a sense of agency, by literally giving them a voice. Being given a voice can also be intimidating, with—as Mathilde put it—“the authority of science in the room.” However, the ritual helped foster a sense of community, everyone was in it together. It also made me think about the collective aspect of working with biomaterials, not just interspecies relationships, but human forms of collectivity that evolve too. The act of carrying the box back to the design department with the micro-organisms in it highlighted the shared responsibility, even within a sometimes fragmented institutional structure. It created a new level of communication between us, though managing the care of the organisms was challenging once you left, Sam, especially with our often diverging and ruptured schedules.

It’s interesting because the vocalization exercise not only gives voice to the participants but also to the materials. When working with living organisms, it’s difficult to summon their agency—how do we make that agency present in collective spaces? It’s like talking to plants or materials—there’s something mediative in that act. It’s about connecting the human and non-human worlds, giving a name and a voice to materials and processes. Normally, in workshops with materials like wood or metal, there’s no talk like this, no mediation. This exercise, however, brings that interaction into focus, and it changes the relationship.

I think that this approach, where you literally “talk” to the materials, shifts the experience. It creates an environment where the materials are seen as participants, not just objects to be manipulated. This vocalization brings more awareness and respect to the material’s agency and helps foster a deeper, more collaborative process.

I am still thinking about students working with living materials and how they face challenges. It might be helpful to offer them advice on how to deal with the pressure of deadlines, especially when they’re passionate about working with these materials but face resistance or a lack of support from their departments. They might feel pressured to deliver specific outcomes. Do you have any thoughts on how to navigate this situation, or have inventive ways to approach this kind of friction?

They could focus on the process and ask themselves: Is there a way within my discipline to present the process itself as part of the outcome? For example, can you present steps or several materializations of the research, or develop a toolkit? In material research, we often start with an idea for an application, then unpack the functionalities and properties needed. The research becomes more about showing the development of those properties than achieving the final application, since time is limited. It’s about breaking down and valorizing parts of the process.

Additionally, engaging in material research connects you to a community of practitioners and researchers. It’s about contributing to a discourse rather than simply producing products. Being able to formulate this shift of perspective, could shift the way you’re assessed.

Thinking through the process, through trial and error, is valuable. These small steps are often discarded or placed in a process book. But they can be seen as part of a conscious thinking process. When organized, like in a morphological chart, they become valuable in themselves, showing the development of your work.

Was there anything surprising to you when hosting the workshop at Gerrit Rietveld Academie?

What I really liked was taking the time to read the text together. We often give students reading assignments but don’t take the time to read aloud. Speaking out loud what you’re reading really changed how I engaged with the text. I had done this before when I was studying, but had forgotten its impact. After the workshop, I told Ista we need to bring this method back, and she agreed.

After the workshop, we were sitting with Mathilde, and they also mentioned the moment we read together. Not everyone knew each other, but something was created in that space—a sense of collectivity and knowledge exchange, and personal stories being shared. It made me reflect on the workshop format, this short-term encounter of people. iIt’s not just about outcomes, prototypes, or products, but also about other forms of knowledge production and the community that forms around specific skills, materials, and methodologies. It’s interesting, especially in relation to the subject of mycelium and networked organisms, and how we conceptualize and relate to them.

I think it’s similar to speaking out loud what you’re doing—it keeps you present. When everyone reads a paragraph aloud, you hear your own voice, and that makes it easier to share or tell something. It’s about creating a sense of safety, and that’s what I try to do in the lab space, make sure students feel safe in a lab space.

There was this first moment during the introduction in the morning, in the garden. We asked students to introduce themselves and say a bit about what they expect and what they found interesting about this workshop. Someone excitedly shouted, “I love mushrooms!” Mathilde said later on that it was not just mushrooms that were produced that day, but much more. I thought it was very beautiful.

**SE **

Following up on everything I said about safety, it is such an important point. To create an environment where it’s okay to not know, where questions are welcomed, and where people feel safe to explore and experiment is vital for fostering creativity and learning. It is so important to make sure that people feel welcome in a lab or in a workshop and that it’s okay to ask stupid questions or to not know something. It’s really about shifting the mindset from seeing questions or mistakes as disruptions, to viewing them as part of the process. You’ve clearly put a lot of effort into making sure that your students have that freedom to ask and try new things, and that’s so essential, especially when working with experimental materials. The balance between safety and freedom is key—allowing room for messiness and exploration without compromising the wellbeing of those in the space.

I also noticed that the lab looked a bit low-profile or low-barrier when I visited. I’d imagine that also shapes the way people engage with it. The sterile, high-tech labs can definitely feel intimidating, like you need to be a specialist just to step foot inside, whereas a more approachable, everyday kind of space opens up opportunities for experimentation, trial and error, and more hands-on learning. I think students feel more empowered to get involved when the space doesn’t feel so “out of reach.” It lowers the barrier to entry and encourages a sense of ownership over the process, even if they’re not experts yet. That DIY approach seems to be very much about encouraging curiosity and fostering an experimental mindset. It sounds like you’ve created a space that’s inviting and accessible, and that kind of environment can be super valuable for people to feel like they belong and are able to contribute—especially when you’re working with materials that themselves are a bit unknown and experimental!

Indeed, it makes a huge difference when you can work without barriers or having to navigate complex systems to get the resources you need. Having that accessible, flexible space, especially for non-experienced students, I think, is key for fostering creativity and experimentation.

AG / MR

Thank you, Sam, for sharing your knowledge with us and our students. We hope to be able to continue the collaboration.

Thank you both.

Listening to Workshops

A conversation with Mathild Clerc

In this conversation, we talk with Mathild Clerc, an alum of both Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Sandberg Instituut, and a workshop specialist in the Fashion Department. Mathild shares insights from her time studying and working at the school and reflects on the often-overlooked but essential role of the workshops (werkplaatsen).

The conversation covers how policy, time pressure, and a general drive for productivity can limit experimentation and access, particularly for master’s students. However, when examined more closely, the workshops seem also to succeed in sustaining spaces for mutual care and informal learning, where knowledge circulates in unpredictable ways, through proximity, trust, and time spent with materials and machines.

In collaboration with Dariya Trubina (alum of the TXT department, GRA), Mathild initiated a series of informal conversations with workshop specialists to highlight the kinds of knowledge, relationships, and forms of learning that emerge within these spaces—often quietly, through doing, observing, asking, and helping. Mathild and Dariya will soon publish the workshop conversations as a small-format interview series.

Mark Redele

Hi Mathild! Could you introduce yourself?

Mathild Clerc

I recently graduated from Sandberg, and before that, from Rietveld. For the past three years, I’ve been working in the fashion department and workshop. Over the last two years, I’ve also been working on a research project with Dariya Trubina, a former TXT student at the Rietveld. Together, we wanted to explore the current role of the workshops within the Rietveld and create more space for what’s already happening there.

The research was mostly discussion-based. We visited six different workshops, and in each one, we centered our conversations on a single tool, machine, or technique. We’ll be publishing a small, simple mini-publication in a couple of months. We’re really excited to share it.

As you can tell, I’ve inhabited many different perspectives within the school, as both a worker and a student. Over the years, I’ve come across a lot of technical issues, but also political ones, which, I must say, I find really interesting.

Do you mean political issues related to the workshops specifically, or more generally?

I mean also in relation to the workshops. The new policy doesn’t only affect the workshops, of course, but the school decided to reduce the contract hours for workshop specialists. And there’s no minimum set. So, for example, in my case, and in many others, we’re only contracted for two days per month. A few others are in the same situation.

You are also teaching at the moment, right?

I am. I’ve been running workshops as a workshop specialist.

Could you tell us a bit about what motivated you to start the interview series with the workshop specialists?

For us, the workshops are really the core of the school and its education, though they often don’t get the space or attention they deserve. The workshops are where students from different departments meet and where collaboration begins, around a book, a specific type of clay, a good question, or simply by helping one another, both formally and informally. For me, these spaces are truly the heart of the school. It’s where I learned the most, technically, socially, and yet I feel this part of the education isn’t treated with enough importance.This is why we started the interview series. When we began the project, we sent an email to the student council saying, “Hey, we want to do something to bring more attention to the workshops.” Slowly, by spending time with the people in the workshops, it became clear that interviews were the medium that made the most sense for us. It was really about being there, just hanging out in the workshops, talking. We’d sit around, doing things, watching, and listening to what was happening.

You asked me earlier, “Can you think of a time when a workshop experience went beyond just learning a skill or completing a project, when it changed how you or others approached making, thinking, or collaborating?” For me, that’s happening all the time in the workshops. It’s just that there aren’t always people around to witness it, except those who work there and spend a lot of time in those spaces.

That’s why we decided to do these interviews. We became witnesses to this constant mode of knowledge sharing, experimentation, and care, for the materials, the machines, and the people. We were really trying to find a way to witness, archive, and share that.

Do you think this dynamic needs to be consistently facilitated or encouraged in the workshop, say, by the workshop specialist? Or is it more of an inherent quality of the workshop itself, something that emerges naturally without intentional facilitation?

I don’t think it necessarily needs to be actively facilitated. However, some of the new rules being introduced at the school seem to hinder this process. For example, you wrote to me, “Workshops are often seen as spaces for making.” I actually wondered who would say that, because I completely disagree.

The school is a very generous space in the sense that we’re not expected to produce things for commercial purposes or to build a business. There’s time to experiment, and many students take advantage of that. But there’s a system in place, already a few years old, that requires booking appointments with the workshops. This means you have to know what you’re going to do in advance. In my opinion, these rules don’t encourage experimentation.

It’s not always a problem, having to book. During busy periods, like right before assessments, when workshops get crowded, these rules make sense. But for most of the year there is space in the workshops for open-ended experimentation. That kind of trial and error is always welcome in many workshops.

There’s definitely something that pushes everyone toward production, but that extends far beyond this school. We’re all influenced by this very productivist society. The first thing you said to me today, Mark, was, “I’m very busy.” That’s usually the first thing people say when we talk.

I really enjoy just sitting in the workshop space and being there for students who might need help. Often students come rushing in wanting to do something specific, but then you find out they’ve never even used a sewing machine, and they say they only have an hour to do it. So I tell them, “Sorry, this isn’t going to work. Let’s try to figure out something else.”

This presumption of the workshop as a place that people use to make something really quickly is true for some workshops but not for others. It also depends on how accessible the machines are.

There’s a clear difference between bachelor’s and master’s students. Students in the master’s programs tend to see the workshops more as a production space in my experience.

Anja Groten

This might also be because bachelor education focuses more on acquiring basic skills. When entering the master’s, there tends to be a false assumption that you already know how to make things, as if the master’s is a time to merely give meaning to the work, intellectualize it. The duration of the master’s is short and more research-driven, so students sometimes see the workshops as a service to translate their intellectual work, using them to materialize their ideas.

I also get the sense that many master’s students view their studies as incredibly precious and often don’t allow themselves to experiment freely in the workshops. They’re perhaps more focused on accelerating their work using the tools available.

During my master’s at Sandberg there was no introduction to the workshops. I ended up giving my classmates a tour, showing them around in the workshops. I also noticed that many students seemed a bit shy about entering the workshops, which surprised me at first. I didn’t expect that from master’s students. But having studied at the Rietveld, I know the Sandberg is often seen as a strange, separate place. This applies both to students and workshop specialists.

At Sandberg, you study for two years, starting in October and finishing by May, so you’re there for only 12–14 months total. Few students actually have, or take the time to experiment in the workshops. It’s a missed opportunity that there’s no basic introduction to the workshops. I’m not sure how it is in other Sandberg departments.

They’ve started doing introductions to the workshops at the beginning of the academic year, but it’s just a brief, general tour. Last year, I taught a class with my students, in which I wanted to center on workshop-based learning. Part of the class involved inviting the “Coordinator of Matter,” Niels Albers, who supports this process on the master’s side. I asked him to share more about the social and material aspects of the workshops, such as who works there, how to approach them, and what their practices are outside the school.

I asked the students to adopt a workshop for a period of time and report back to their peers about what it’s like to work there, the possibilities, materials, and techniques. This class was meant to help them overcome the shyness you mentioned, which can be a real barrier. Many think they need a plan or a product in mind before they can go to the workshop; otherwise, they feel there’s no reason to be there. They don’t want to waste anyone’s time. It’s not always out of bad intentions; they just often come with the wrong expectations or too late in the process.

I agree that time is really important. Truly familiarizing yourself with a workshop and treating it as a familiar space takes time and adjustment. In the master’s program, there often isn’t enough space or time for that process.

Something as simple as spending a whole day at the start of the school year at Sandberg, visiting each workshop, could make a big difference. Workshop specialists usually have time at this time of year and are happy to show what’s happening. This kind of introduction would easily fit into the curriculum, and help students who are shy or unsure about what to expect. They’d get to see the people who work there, learn a bit about the processes, see the machines, and check out examples from the archive. It would cost very little compared to the benefits it could bring. It could also help strengthen the fragile bond between Rietveld and Sandberg.

Do you sometimes think of workshop specialists as a kind of authority? For me, that authority is still very present in the workshops, and I wonder if we sometimes forget that many students are specialists too. They could also function as specialists within the workshops, if their knowledge were more welcomed.

I think they’re already very welcome.

But maybe the students don’t always feel that, or they don’t feel encouraged to step into that role in the workshop—thinking, “I bring certain material knowledge, and there’s space for that here.”

Look at the bookbinding workshop: Gersande, who is working there now, was one of my classmates and spent so much time in that workshop as a student that, after graduating, she was offered a job there. When the workshop was busy, Ott and Miguel even sent people to Gersande for support. The same happened with other former students. Cesar, for example, who now works in the printing workshop in the basement, and Vic, who works in the silkscreen workshop.

These are all former students who spent a lot of time in the workshops. The sharing of expertise between staff and students can happen quite naturally. There are limitations, though, in places with dangerous machines, such as the wood and metal workshops, where delegation is trickier because of safety measures.

How do you see danger as a paradigm that separates, say, professional knowledge from naive knowledge?

What do you mean by naive knowledge?

I’m not sure what else to call it. I guess by “naive knowledge” I mean the knowledge a student brings, as opposed to the expertise held by the workshop specialist. It seems that “danger” is often the reason these kinds of knowledge are kept separate. Only the workshop specialist is allowed to work with certain machines or has to demonstrate how to use them. Do you have any thoughts on this?

As a student, I was able to do a lot of work on my own because I already had experience with woodwork. For example, I took a class on traditional French carpentry where we used a circular saw, a machine that weighs about 10 kilos and has a 30-centimeter blade. It’s definitely dangerous, and for many people, it was their first time using it.

We had two teachers and ten students. I was amazed at how they demonstrated the machine, then simply asked, “Do you feel okay working with it?” If you said yes, they would leave you to work on your own.

One of the teachers was a woman, a carpenter specializing in traditional French carpentry, who even started a school to teach women this craft. She has an interesting approach to education and group learning. At the end of the course, I told her how much I appreciated the way she introduced the dangerous machine. She admitted it was tough for her too, saying, “It’s fucking scary” to just let people handle it.

But working with a potentially dangerous tool really depends on the person. For some, having someone beside them is helpful; for others, it’s stressful to feel someone breathing down their neck. In my experience, when workshop specialists enforce certain rules, whether legal or safety-related, it acts as a kind of paralanguage we can all understand and discuss. It’s also a way to reclaim authority. I now realize there are other stressful moments in a workshop. Maybe someone is overwhelmed or struggling to handle many things at once. These rules become a way to negotiate how things get done.

You are right, it really depends on the person. That’s why having a personal connection to a workshop or a workshop specialist is so important. It helps you discover where there’s room to relax or stretch the rules, kind of easing the authority in a way.

Exactly. Knowing each other really helps to avoid seeing the workshop purely as a production space. Today, many people came in saying, “I want to do this. Tell me how.” Sometimes, I don’t mind just giving a straightforward answer and letting them get on with it. But other times, I say, “Okay, just try it yourself a bit and see what you can figure out.”

Would you like to tell us about one or two of the interviews you conducted with the workshops?

One of the conversations in the weaving workshop really stuck with me. Maybe because I used to be a student at TXT and already knew the three people we were going to talk to fairly well. The conversation centered on a meeting that had taken place ten years earlier. Each of the three shared their own version of what happened. We ended up speaking to them individually. Here’s what happened:Back then, they were discussing the possibility of buying a domestic DACA Jacquard loom for the textile department—a huge investment of around €40,000. That’s a significant sum, especially for a small department. In the end, they decided against it. This part of the publication therefore focuses on a loom that isn’t in the workshop but which, in our view, reveals far more about the workshop than any of the looms they actually have.It was Gene and Severin who took part in this conversation as well as Joost who wasn’t even working at the workshop when the decision was made. There were different reasons why they didn’t want to purchase the machine. Cost was obviously a major factor, but space was tight too. Bringing in a large Jacquard loom would mean letting go of other looms, and they didn’t want to sacrifice existing equipment.

Time and maintenance were concerns as well. A complex machine would demand more care, and Severin didn’t want to become a “slave to the machine.”

The Jacquard loom is flashy and exciting; if they bought one, people would line up year-round to create something cool on it. But that’s not the way they wanted to work.

Severin knows all the machines currently in the workshop. All the looms are “open” in the sense that a newcomer can tinker, pull a string, or touch something and eventually understand how it works, or at least where the problem is. The Jacquard loom, on the other hand, is a black box, an extremely complicated machine.

They also felt that the Netherlands no longer has a textile industry, so investing in an industrial-style Jacquard loom at an art school didn’t make much sense. They questioned how they wanted to relate to industry and what’s important when working in the textile workshop. It’s essential to take the time to understand the machine, both for specialists and students alike, and that’simpossible with the Jacquard.

Setting up a simple loom can take weeks. A Jacquard could take even longer before it’s running. They estimated only three to five people would use it in a whole year, which wasn’t appealing. So, they decided against buying the loom.

Across the corridor, in the letterpress workshop, there’s a big machine, an old offset press. Do you know why it’s there? Because someone offered it for free. The previous workshop specialist accepted it and removing it would have been too costly. When Joost took over the workshop, they wondered why such a huge, barely-used press was there instead of four or five smaller machines. But they kept it, invested time in learning it, and now some amazing projects come out of that press. It’s fascinating to witness these different approaches.

It’s really interesting what you’re describing about the Jacquard loom and the offset machine, machines that seem free but actually cost us a huge amount of labour. It reminds me of the discussions around the open source software community. There is a book edited by Femke Snelting for Constant, Association for Art and Media, which is called Conversations: the best, biggest thing that Free Software has to offer. The conversations in that book feel closely related to your point about using conversation as a way to explore complex systems.

The Jacquard loom’s complexity exceeds the resources we have, our time, our people, our capacity to make sense of it. If we cannot understand it, tweak it, question it, or work through its problems with students, then what can we really learn from it? We are, after all, an educational institution. Learning is our purpose. If a machine’s inner workings remain opaque, why invite it into our space?

And yet it is tempting. We tell ourselves we must prepare students for industry, so we make these choices quickly. And later on we find ourselves having built dependencies that we cannot easily escape.

Studying is such a crucial moment, not just a phase where students obtain knowledge, but where they actually start building relationships with tools and techniques. If we only teach them how to use Adobe Creative Suite, they obviously become dependent on expensive proprietary, closed software. They end up locked into this system, the software, because a whole economy is built around closed and proprietary tools.

These tools seem free or cheap while you’re at university, but it’s eighty euros a month after you graduate. And with that comes the pressure to earn enough just to keep using what you were taught to use. It becomes a productivity nightmare, and we’re responsible for it.

All because of one decision, maybe just the choice to explore one particular machine.

We often talk about postcapitalism in a theoretical way, but there’s no school that actually prepares us for it. How are we supposed to operate in a world without Photoshop, or within an entirely different economic system?

I’ve worked in various art school contexts, including those that lean toward a neoliberal makerspace model, focused on fast prototyping and an instrumental, productivity-driven idea of “makability.” In contrast, the workshops at the Rietveld take a much more critical approach in my view. There’s more time and attention given to reflection, they’re slower. But they don’t call it “critical making.” They simply resist that stressed, efficiency-driven mode of working, almost as a matter of deep conviction. There are no hackathons at Rietveld. To me, these workshops are genuinely critical spaces for making, even if they don’t use that language.

I think that point captures something essential about how knowledge in a workshop can easily become centralized, not only through machines that act like black boxes but also through the people who operate them with such depth and experience. It’s fragile, because when a person moves on, what happens to their knowledge? Watching a workshop specialist step into a role and grow into it is beautiful, but it also reveals how much this relies on proximity, relationships, and time. Anyway, that’s probably another conversation altogether.

Thank you so much for being here with us today, Mathild, it’s really exciting. It’s not the first time I’ve heard this story, but it still fascinates me. I’m really looking forward to reading the publication.

Thank you, Mark and Anja. See you soon.

Material Encounter

## Material Encounters

Transcript summary of lecture event, organized by Materiality Research Group in collaboration with The Netherlands Institute for Conservation+Art+Science+ (NICAS), moderated by Márk Redele.

Tuesday, 17 December 2024, GRA/SI Library

Despite severe winds battering in the Netherlands causing widespread disruptions of public transport, we were able to gather on 17 December, 2024, in the library of Gerrit Rietveld Academie to welcome three speakers and attendees to the sixth and final event of the “How Material Comes to Matter” series.

To start the evening Márk Redele brought up the term transposition. Transposition might be familiar to some for example, from music, where a song can be transposed from one key to another, or from a drawing that might be distorted based on a set of rules. In general, transposition refers to a dynamic where one thing is moved or shifted from one domain to another while maintaining its essential properties and intrinsic relationships.

In the book Transpositions: Aesthetico-Epistemic Operators in Artistic Research, the authors reflect on how, in artistic practice, this movement between different contexts or disciplines can help generate new insights. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger states that transposition takes things from one context and through this operation things are “brought into a constellation where we can marvel at and do things with them.” Transposition activates a model that enables interaction with complex environments that are otherwise resistant to interaction or pose ethical challenges. Yve Lomax, in her contribution to the book, attempts to articulate how something can be had without being possessed.

Márk proposed that all three invited guests—and the practices they bring—share a core dynamic: the movement of elements from one context to another.

Julia Ihls is overseeing the Bio Design Lab at the University of Arts and Design in Karlsruhe, which is a material library and laboratory with close ties to the Black Forest in Germany. The lab and its location enables working on and with the materials of the forest and the region.

Clem Edwards is a Rotterdam-based artist who gathers materials through encounter. Their work merges language and sculpture to explore materiality, labor, and societal conditions. These materials make their way into small installations with complex interrelated dynamics. Little environments where things balance and hold each other while they hint at larger interconnected systems. Clem also makes tiny houses out of rice. They can be held, carried, and they afford handling this way, which in turn helps to imagine relationships beyond the nuclear family.
Marjolijn Bol, associate professor of technical art history at Utrecht University and principal investigator of the research project “Dynamics of the Durable,” funded by the European Research Council (ERC), pays attention to art objects from the past and the present. These objects need to be brought into some kind of investigative realm in order to gain insight into the composition of materials in them and to apply transformations to speculate on their durability, value etc.

Each speaker offered their unique perspective on materiality, temporality, preservation, and the intersection of human and non-human worlds—worlds and phenomena that often seem too large, dynamic, complex, fragile, or elusive to be investigated or grasped.

Questions that were explored during the evening were:

How do we approach the relationship between a-material-as-is and a material that can be brought into a realm of inquiry?
What do we do with materials in order to bring them into a graspable realm, where we can question them and work together with them?
How do we see reciprocity in regard to this relationship? Do we see materials as having agency in their interactions with us? If so, how does that shape the way we approach them?
Could we explore the proposition: how something can be had without being possessed?
What happens to materials once we direct our inquisitive gaze at them?
How can we imagine materiality beyond extractive practices?
How can we create a counter-image of material-as-resource?
How can we engage with the ephemera, the impermanence and fragility of certain types of material encounters? Julia Ihls

Julia’s presentation titled “Shifting to Drifting by Design: An Ecotonal Practice at the Interface of Design and Natural Science,” offered a brief introduction to the topic of Biodesign, a field operating at the intersection of design and the natural sciences.

According to Julia, the concept of “shifting ground” resonates with an understanding of the world as becoming increasingly complex and deeply interconnected. An event as seemingly distant as a ship blocking the Suez Canal demonstrates how global trade can be affected in unexpected ways.

In the book The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, anthropologist Anna Tsing describes friction as “the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference.” Such encounters between diverse and conflicting worlds hold the potential to generate new cultural and power arrangements. The challenge is to make this friction productive, particularly when it emerges at the intersection of disciplines, spatial configurations, funding structures, or temporalities.

Julia’s discussion then turned to matter and materiality. Contemporary discourse, including new materialism and posthumanism, suggests that matter possesses its own agency—an autonomous existence with contradictions and conditions. This perspective is particularly relevant in Biodesign, where the integration of living materials and organisms into design challenges conventional notions of materiality. Biodesign extends beyond familiar concepts such as biomimicry or cradle-to-cradle design. It involves incorporating living organisms and ecosystems into design processes, dissolving the boundaries between natural and built environments to create hybrid typologies.

Working with living organisms introduces both ethical and practical considerations. It prompts critical questions such as: Could life forms be engaged without reducing them to mere tools or materials? Is it possible to respect even microscopic life, incorporating it into design without exploitation? Furthermore, how might designers cultivate an empathetic approach toward these life forms, allowing them a degree of autonomy in the design process?

Elvin Karana’s framework of “living artifacts” offers valuable principles for working with living materials:

Living Aesthetics: Engaging with organisms such as fungi or bacteria presents new sensory experiences—distinct textures, scents, and tactile qualities—challenging traditional perceptions of aesthetics.
Mutualistic Care: Unlike inert materials that can be extracted and manipulated at will, living materials require a relationship of care. Their growth and cultivation timelines need to be respected.
Habitability: Designing is not centered solely on human needs but also considers the habitats necessary for non-human organisms. The goal is to create environments beneficial for all life forms. An example of this approach is the Fungal Frequencies project, developed by the collective SurrealLabor. This project explores the electrical activity within mycelium networks. Mycelium, often used as a metaphor for interconnectedness, functions as a dynamic living system. The project investigates the possibility of “listening” to these electrical signals and identifying patterns, potentially enabling a form of communication between humans and more-than-human organisms.

A well-known example of Biodesign in practice is Neri Oxman’s Silk Pavilion. In this project, over 70,000 silkworms engaged in the creation of a hybrid material. Traditionally, silkworms are cultivated for their silk, a process that often resulted in their destruction. In the Silk Pavilion, however, the silkworms are allowed to complete their natural cycle without harm, demonstrating an alternative approach to integrating living organisms into design ethically.

The temporality of Biodesign materials presents another significant challenge. Many of these materials are biodegradable, yet questions arise regarding their durability. How can materials be designed to degrade naturally while remaining functional within the built environment? Achieving this balance between longevity and biodegradability remains a key consideration.

Additionally, Biodesign necessitates a shift in scale. Traditional design operates primarily within the human scale, but Biodesign expands this perspective to include microorganisms, plant systems, and entire ecosystems. Temporality also needs to be reconsidered. While fungi might take months or years to grow, human lifespans are significantly shorter. This shift in scale—whether in terms of body, operation, time, or aesthetics— fundamentally alters the way design has been approached.

The transition from shifting to drifting involves navigating unstable grounds. The Bio Design Lab in Karlsruhe, established in 2020, exemplifies an approach that fosters interdisciplinary collaboration between art, science, and design. Unlike traditional laboratories, which are sterile and closed environments, this lab has been designed to facilitate open exchange and communication. It serves as both a research space and a platform for exhibitions and education, providing an opportunity to experiment with living materials in an open, dynamic setting.

One initiative developed within the lab is the “Living Library”—a material library featuring biodegradable and temporary materials derived from waste. This resource provides designers, artists, and scientists with the opportunity to experiment with novel Biodesign materials. Additionally, international summer schools hosted at the lab bring together participants from diverse backgrounds to collaboratively explore the future of life through hands-on projects and discussions.

Archiving living materials presents another intriguing challenge. For example, photogrammetry has been used to digitally preserve SCOBY cultures (bacterial cellulose), allowing for the documentation of living materials without halting their natural cycles. This raises the fundamental question: Can digital archives adequately capture the dynamic nature of living materials, or do they merely serve as static records of something that is in constant transformation?

Ultimately, Biodesign offers an opportunity to engage directly with the material world through attunement to ecological and disciplinary intersections—what could be called ecotonal spaces. The philosopher Karen Barad states that “knowing does not come from standing at a distance and representing, but from direct material engagement with the world.” By embracing this direct engagement, it becomes possible to navigate the shifting, drifting, and often unstable grounds of Biodesign, fostering new possibilities for collaboration, care, and innovation.

Marjolijn Bol

Marjolijn Bol’s lecture began with a reading of a passage from H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, which described a far-future museum in what had once been London. In this distant era, the time traveler encountered a vast, dilapidated structure made of porcelain, complete with inscriptions and skeletal remains, evoking a powerful image of enduring human artifacts. This passage was used to introduce the central theme of the talk: the history and notion of durability in art and cultural heritage.

Marjolijn then connected Wells’s vision to contemporary practices of conservation and restoration, emphasizing that museums had long served as custodians of art and cultural objects, preserving items that ranged from 13th-century paintings to ancient ceramics and gold relics. She argued that the institutional practices of collection, preservation, and repair in Western Europe had shaped what was considered valuable, while also raising questions about the inherent durability of these artifacts. But where did this institutional quest for long-lasting stuff come from?

Marjolijn reflected on this question by exploring the initial impulse behind creating lasting objects, which was the question of how past artisans had experimented with making objects that could endure, and why their patrons desired art with such lasting power. She introduced her ERC-research project, known by its acronym DURARE, which focused on the history of durability in art. The project examines historical texts and legal documents—from guild regulations and warranty declarations to recipe treatises—to uncover how durability was defined and achieved in different eras. For instance, a 12th-century recipe by the monk Theophilus described a special varnish intended to make art objects permanent, highlighting the deliberate intention behind ensuring an object’s longevity.

Historical reconstructions are used as a methodological tool to investigate these recipes. One example involved recreating fake gems according to a fourth-century formula, in which crystals were colored with copper green by cracking and dyeing them to mimic the appearance of emeralds. These practical experiments offered insights into the technical challenges and time scales involved in producing durable art, as well as the cultural assumptions about longevity that varied between epochs.

Marjolijn contrasted Western approaches to durability with alternative models. In Western art conservation, objects are often “frozen in time” and preserved meticulously, which underscores a desire to maintain the original state of an artifact. She illustrated this by references to a painting and a sculpture—one a panel painting that was expected to last over 500 years if properly varnished, and the other a marble sculpture by Michelangelo, intended for eternal remembrance despite inevitable changes over time. In contrast, the lecture referred to examples such as the Naikū Shrine in Japan, which was rebuilt every 20 years, thereby preserving cultural practices rather than static artifacts.

Furthermore, the lecture ventured into contemporary debates about durability by discussing modern artistic interventions. She presented the example of Banksy, where the transformation of street art into a framed, auctioned piece can be seen as a commentary on institutionalized durability and the commercialization of art. This led her to broader reflections on how the historical legacy of crafting enduring objects influences current practices and values regarding cultural heritage.

Finally, Marjolijn touched on emerging projects that further questioned traditional notions of permanence. An example included an art installation created from nuclear waste, intended to be housed in a nuclear waste storage facility as a time capsule for 1,000 years. This project raised ethical and practical questions about the treatment of toxic materials and the responsibilities of preserving art far into the future.

Overall, Marjolijn’s lecture presented an elaborate exploration of durability as both a technical and cultural phenomenon. It examined how historical practices, legal frameworks, and artisanal recipes contributed to a tradition of making art objects last, and it challenged the audience to reconsider whether striving for eternal durability was always desirable or even feasible in today’s rapidly changing cultural landscape.

Clem Edwards

Clem presented a choice to their audience between two texts—one about rats and another, a newer, rougher poem on white phosphorus. The audience opted for the latter, and Clem proceeded with a reading, setting the stage with an image from their studio, meant as a visual anchor for what is primarily an auditory experience.

Clem reminded us the talk was framed around the concept of transposition, which they interpreted both in a literal editorial sense—where letters and words are reordered—and in a broader poetic and material sense, where ideas, objects, and histories shift and take on new meaning. They reflected on their own practice as an artist and writer, drawing parallels between sculptural assemblage and the process of repositioning words and concepts in storytelling.

The reading began with a childhood memory of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl, a tale steeped in European folk traditions of suffering and magical visions. Clem contrasted this with their Australian upbringing, reflecting on how storytelling has historically oscillated between the uncanny and the mundane, the extraordinary and the ordinary. They noted how the rise of the realist novel marked a move away from the mystical and into the realm of the rational, mirroring the industrial transformation of human society.

From here, the focus shifted to phosphorus, an element with a dark and storied past. The audience was transported to 1669, where a German merchant-alchemist, Henning Brand, discovers phosphorus while boiling down vast quantities of urine in search of the Philosopher’s Stone. This luminous, waxy substance, named after the celestial morning star, later finds its way into 19th-century matchstick factories, where young women and girls labor in toxic conditions, inhaling phosphorus fumes until their very bones begin to glow and rot—a gruesome disease known as phossy jaw.

The narrative then leaps forward to the industrial era, where phosphorus becomes essential for modern warfare, used in munitions, most infamously in incendiary bombs. Clem recounted its role in the the World War Two bombing campaign, tracing its continued presence in the landscape—how, even in 2017, an unsuspecting beach goer in Hamburg mistook a remnant of white phosphorus for amber, only to have it ignite spontaneously in their pocket.

The timeline extended to the 21st century, where Clem linked phosphorus to its continued deployment in conflict zones, specifically Gaza. They referenced reports documenting the Israeli military’s use of white phosphorus munitions during Operation Cast Lead in 2009, describing the indiscriminate devastation it wrought on civilians, hospitals, and schools. They noted how legal loopholes allow phosphorus to evade classification as a chemical weapon, despite its lethal effects.

Throughout the reading, Clem wove together personal and historical threads, revealing a deeply entangled lineage of phosphorus—from the alchemist’s basement to colonial industry, from imperial warfare to modern geopolitical violence. This meditation on phosphorus as both a material and a metaphor led to a final reflection on inheritance: “the stories we tell, the legacies we bear, and the choices we make in framing history.” In a poignant closing revelation, Clem shared an image of their grandfather, who most likely dropped white phosphorus marker-bombs over Hamburg during World War II—making their own connection to this toxic inheritance all the more direct and visceral.

The talk ended on a contemplative note, returning to the act of storytelling itself. Clem imagined striking a match, illuminating a constellation of connections across time—“between a morning star, a factory girl, an alchemist, a war zone, and a piece of land still burning.” They expressed a desire to rewrite and rethink these inherited narratives, questioning whose stories get told and who is granted the humanity to be remembered.

With this, the presentation closed, leaving the audience to sit with the weight of history, the mutability of storytelling, and the ethical responsibility of bearing witness.

Material Colophon

None

MaterialMatters

MaterialMatters

Table of Contents

Introduction

How Material Comes to Matter

Workshops as sites of collective resistance and reimagination

Anja Groten, Márk Redele

Otherwise_Possible_Connections

Otherwise Possible Connections:

A conversation with IPOP (Elioa Steffens and Szymon Adamczak)

Speaking out loud with fungi

Listening to Workshops

Listening to Workshops

A conversation with Mathild Clerc

Material Encounter

Transcript summary of lecture event, organized by Materiality Research Group in collaboration with The Netherlands Institute for Conservation+Art+Science+ (NICAS), moderated by Márk Redele.

Tuesday, 17 December 2024, GRA/SI Library

Material Colophon

Index