chapter
Introduction Day X Material Library
Date: August 27, 2026 | Location: Large Glass, Garden Department, Bookbinding
Photos and audio will be recorded during this event for documentation. Please inform us if you prefer not to appear in published images.
Today, you will learn more about the following workshops: Large Glass, Garden Department, and Bookbinding.
Besides exploring these workshops together, we are also introducing you to the Material Library, an initiative that aims to gather materials, tools, recipes, and anecdotes from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie into an online database.
The motivation behind it is to create a space where we can reflect on and discuss the materials and tools we use, consume, and dispose of, while highlighting the labor of the people who hold knowledge about them and bring them to life every day. Ultimately, we want to gain deeper insight into the culture created by the things that surround us and what we rely on as a community.
We invite you to explore these ideas with us today and contribute to the Material Library through your workshop interactions.
We encourage you to take photos of the plants, paper, glass pieces, staplers, pruning shears, gas torches, and any other materials or tools you encounter, and to ask your Workshop Specialists questions about them. We are curious about your previous experiences with these materials, as well as the thoughts, feelings, and questions they evoke in you.
Use your phone to take photos of everything you touch and use today.
Ask questions about the tools and materials you work with. The workshop specialists can help you get answers.
Share your personal thoughts, anecdotes, or previous experiences with these objects.
Questions to consider today
-
What does the tool do in your hand?
-
What does it do to you?
-
How would you describe your relationship with them?
-
What do you want to know about them?
-
Where are they coming from?
-
What can they do for you?
-
What can you do for them?
-
What happense to them once they are not needed anymore?
-
Who takes care of these things?
What is the Material Library and the Material Assemblies?
-
Rietveld community
-
Materials, tools, recipes, anecdotes, people
-
Hands-on exploration, connecting to what we can touch
-
Material Assemblies, discourse and guest presentations
-
Material Library, a map of materials
-
Better access to and insight into our materials
The Material Library is an initiative that foregrounds the interconnected material processes underlying the life of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie as a place of education, a building with diverse facilities, and a socio-material community. It seeks to bring the academy’s complex material domain into a visible and graspable realm through a digital, visual database, while also creating publics around and with the materials of the academy.
The library expands through intensive workshops called Material Assemblies that are held throughout the year. Open for students and staff, these workshops identify opportunistic entry points into the material chains of the academy and explore the links that connect them. The library grows by tracing materials that are consumed, produced, condensed, and transformed within the academy.
The online platform serves as the home of the materials - persons, tools, recipes, stories and other knowledges - identified and gathered through the Material Assemblies workshops. The archive is navigable through the floorplan of the academy. Visitors can switch between the different floors so that both the horizontal and vertical dimensions of the buildings can be explored. Graphical markers on the map indicate materials and their relations to each other. Through these markers, one can access the textual, media and meta information linked to each material.
Visit the Material Library
The online platform is accessible at materials.rietveldsandberg.nl
You can visit the Library in the FedLev building where you can browse the Material Library on a dedicated computer. If you can’t find it, ask the librarian.
Contribute to the Material Library
You are welcome to join the Material Assemblies, the workshops where we explore different material chains and contexts during the year. If you are interested you can write an email to mark.redele@rietveldacademie.nl
You can also propose to add materials to the Material Library and you can even receive a user account to add them yourself. You might want to do this to map out the tools and materials connected to your art project, practical or theory assignments, final thesis or a research project that you will do in your upcoming time at the academy. This way you can share it with the community.
How to contribute?
-
Make a short proposal, how and why you want to add materials to the Material Library. Ideally it connects to a project you are working on.
-
Reach out to me through mark.redele@rietveldacademie.nl. I might ask you to improve certain aspects of your plan before continuing,
-
You will receive a user account with which you can add to and modify materials on the online platform.
-
Add materials, images, descriptions and create connections between them or with already existing materials.
The Material Library was initiated by Márk Redele and co-hosted by Rietveld Sandberg Research and Urgent Ecologies.