chapter

Introduction

Material Library and the Material Assemblies

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 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.

Navigating the Material Library through the academy’s floorplan underscores the school as an active site of material-dynamic processes. This spatial approach places materials in the real-world contexts the community is already familiar with, allowing users to explore and understand them through their specific roles and relationships within the academy. By connecting materials to their physical locations, the platform highlights the relational character of material practices and offers an experience grounded in the spatial and material dynamics of the school itself.

The online platform to be open to the public in the first half of 2026.

Material Assemblies

The library expands through intensive workshops held throughout the year. Aimed at 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 Material Assemblies are a material-discursive framework that brings together direct engagement with materials, thinking and discussion. The meetings take place twice a year, with participants consisting of students, staff of the academy and invited guests. This arrangement provides the basis for the discussions throughout each Material Assembly session, where materials are invited to be marveled at, their properties, relationships and circumstances are explored, descriptions and digressions are introduced, and finally the members of the assembly decide on their inclusion in the library.

The term “material-discursive” speaks to the inseparable relationship between the physical world (the material) and the meanings we ascribe to it (the discursive). Rather than thinking of these as separate realms, the concept insists that they continuously shape one another. Materials – the objects, bodies, processes, technologies and environments we interact with – are not neutral or static. Instead, they are deeply intertwined with the stories, anecdotes, language, external and internal relationships and cultural frameworks we use to make sense of them.

“Discursive practices and material phenomena do not stand in a relationship of externality to one another; rather the material and the discursive are mutually implicated in the dynamics of intra-activity. But nor are they reducible to one another. The relationship between the material and the discursive is one of mutual entailment. Neither is articulated/articulable in the absence of the other; matter and meaning are mutually articulated. Neither discursive practices nor material phenomena are ontologically or epistemologically prior. Neither can be explained in terms of the other. Neither has privileged status in determining the other.” (Barad 2003, 822)

In this sense, material refers to the tangible elements of the world around us, while discursive refers to the ways we talk about, frame, categorize and understand those elements within specific social and cultural contexts, here particularly relating to the context of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and art education.