Reading Groups


In Touch
Hosted by Amelia Groom

Running in parallel to the 2018 Studium Generale programme, Amelia Groom hosts In Touch, a reading group concerned with the haptic qualities of written and spoken language. The sessions introduce participants to inscribed and performed texts by a range of writers, artists, and theorists (including Sara Ahmed, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Brandon LaBelle, Anne Carson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Wayne Koestenbaum, Fred Moten, Pauline Oliveros, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Avital Ronell), with particular attention given to bodies and their modes of intersensorial contact, contagion, and contamination (all words coming from con + tangere meaning ‘touching together’).

Location: Room 116

Amelia Groom is a writer based in Amsterdam. She completed her PhD in Art History & Theory at the University of Sydney in 2014. Her writing has been published in various journals and exhibition contexts, and in 2013 she edited the Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press ‘Documents of Contemporary Art’ anthology on TIME. She teaches writing and theory at the Sandberg Instituut (Critical Studies and Master of Voice MFAs) and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (Graphic Design department).

Touch Me Like You Do (The Tongues of Eros)
Hosted by Ioanna Gerakidi

Holding touch as a notion affiliated with eros, love, and power, the reading group aims to create a space that touches and is touched by the textures of the fractured, inconsistent, and non-linear narratives of the erotic. Both reading and listening are here used as schemas and tools to explore, trace, embody, and vocalize the uses of touch. Materials vary from text to sound, from kinetic to visual references. Students are invited to look at reading as a way to think about cultural practices, and listening as a practice of “auscultation”, of sensing the tactility of eros. Hearing sessions, screenings, collective and phonetic approaches to texts, brief exercises, and rituals related to the themes of this year’s Studium Generale, are included in each reading group meeting. Sources include: Sophie Collins, Euripides, FAKA, Clarice Lispector, Audre Lorde, Leticia Meynell, Fred Moten, José E. Muñoz, Friedrich Nietzsche, Denise F. Da Silva, Lynne Tillman, Yves Tumor, Hypatia Vourloumis, and Virgina Woolf among others.

Location: Library

Ioanna Gerakidi works as an artist, writer, and curator, based both in Amsterdam and Athens. She holds a BA in Media and Communication Studies (University of Athens) and an MA in Critical Studies (Sandberg Instituut). In 2013, she cofounded Implode Platform for Sound Arts (GR) and in 2016 she co-initiated Uh Uh Uh Umm Reading Group (NL). In 2017 she co-authored, edited, and self-published the book I EAT THE WORDS AND THEY TASTE OF HISTORY.

Both reading groups are open to 10–15 Rietveld students. Participants should be able to attend all or most sessions. The reading groups run over the course of eight Wednesday afternoons between 10 January and 14 March following each Studium Generale lecture programme. All reading and listening materials are provided in advance.