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Rietveld Uncut

Rietveld Uncut is an annual exhibition and performance programme by the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. Its collaboration with Studium Generale builds up to a simultaneous conference-week and exhibition in which ‘the making and the thinking’ comes together. Departments and students have developed projects in relation to the theoretical framework of Studium Generale under the title 'Hold Me Now – Feel and Touch in an Unreal World'

The exhibition took place from March 21 - 24 at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

Participating departments: Graphic Design, Jewellery – linking bodies, designLAB, Architectural Design, Beeld en Taal, The Large Glass, Ceramics, VAV – moving image, Photography

Participating students: Ilse Stokman; Lianne van Roekel; Thom van Rijckevorsel; Elena Giolo; Garance Früh; Hyeonju Lee and Niklas Büscher; Xenia Perek and Nazanin Karimi; Max Glader; Nomin Zezegmaa; Valter Tornberg; Oda Haugerud; Laura Fernández Antolín; Aleksandra Kwiatkowska; Manon Bachelier, Eliott Déchamboux, and Kaspar Sellin; Cleo Tsw and Philip Ullman; Margherita Chinchio; Kim Lang; and Annie Åkerman and Cornelia Isaksson.



  • The Logged Touch


  • Alix Chauvet, Brigita Kudarauskaite, Camilla Kövecses, Chloe Delchini, Eleonora Šljanda, Filip Birkner, Jim Klok, Johannes Reisigl, Joyce Chang, Kim Wenrui Zhao, Kirill Zakomoldin, Klara Eneroth, Lisa Arkhangelskaya, Mark Emil Poulsen, Maxime Selin, Michelle Parrott, Mona Mercier, Ossip Blits, Virginia Vivaldi, Swani Vinton, Vica Allakhverdyan, Wieke Willemsen, Youngjin Park, Yuri Sato

  • Supervised by Femke Herregraven
  • Graphic Design

  • What if the keyboard was no longer the primary tool for writing? What if you could peel away your stress and anxiety? What if the working class no longer had hands? What if there was an archive of touch? What if you could download a hug? In digital technologies every touch is recorded, logged, and immortalized as meta-data. A touch is no longer only bodily and ephemeral but also mediated and archival. We are touched not only by other humans, but also by non-human actors such as microbes, electric signals, or sounds. The Logged Touch presents a series of scenarios that imagine new developments around touching and being touched.


  • Tele-Tactility, Feel, Contact

  • Cross-pollination

  • Fabric, soil, metal, robe, wood, fungi, fat, LED light, glass, DDT, CH4(methane gas)

  • Caroline Bach, Esben Larsen, Eloïse Dieutegard, Franca Ullrich, Jet van der Touw, Jonas Hejduk, Juchen Dai, Juliette Delarue, Kenshiro Suzuki, Laura Schürch, Maria Yzaga de las Casas, Marie-Louise Schmidlin, Margherita Chinchio, Marguerite Boneil, Mica Pan, Leon Bloch, Naomi Lamdin, Nicolas Rotta, Patrycja Beliniak, Pauline Rip, Puck van Donselaar, Seonmi Shin, Sien van Look, Silvana McNulty, Tjacco Bakker, Yunting Zhang

  • With Clemens Driessen, Assistant Professor, Cultural Geography, Wageningen University and teachers from the Rietveld Academy's collaborating departments
  • Jewellery – linking bodies and designLAB.

  • What role can touch and being touched play in multidisciplinary research fields when written and spoken language is a limitation? How can we use physical, haptic, and speculative design objects to connect artistic and scientific research? Based on these questions and related to eleven different scientific PhD-research projects from Wageningen University, Jewellery – linking bodies and designLAB students collaborated and developed portable conversation pieces that trigger curiosity, wonder, touch, sensory communication, dialogue, feedback, and new perspectives on this research.


  • Button, Contact Disability, Finger Force, Interface, Intimacy, Joystick, Love Manicures, Pain Perception, Phantom Pressure, Prosthesis, Skin, Surface, Tentacles, Touch

  • The Touch Arcade


  • Beatrice Vancaillie, Carl Johan Jacobsen, Daniel Govert Slats, Emilia Omilianowicz, Filipp Luzin, Julia Lok, Kieren Hinde, Laure Duclaux, Nadja Schlenker, Ruben Raven, Minjoo Choi, Simon Marsiglia, Leoke van Geffen, Tom Vincent, Celia Nabonne

  • designLAB

  • The Touch Arcade is a collection of experiments by first-year designLAB students. Each work invites you to interact with it through feeling, often in unfamiliar ways. The Touch Arcade aims to seduce, entice, and repel simultaneously. You might expect one thing and experience another, or discover a feeling you did not anticipate. You might encounter sensual mysteries. In time, the sense of touch reveals itself. It is not a coincidence that the word feeling describes both touch and emotions. Touch, or the lack thereof, can evoke a variety of emotional responses, and feeling never works alone. Through touch, the students of designLAB test the spectrum of senses that form a system that is refined and intriguing.


  • Seduce, Entice, Repel

  • Touch – a neglected aspect – in architecture


  • AIR CO., Annan Yap, Alma van de Burgwal, Daria Nakov, Eloi Gimeno, Felicia Ljusteräng, Tanya Kuznetsova, Thomas Viers, Niveau zero atelier

  • Guidance: Henri Snel
  • Architectural Design

  • According to neuropsychology professor Edward de Haan, the senses are peripherals. A single sense is often dominant: the tongue of the chef, the skin of the toucher, the nose of the perfumer. What is the spatial designer’s most strongly developed sense? The prevailing wisdom holds that it is sight. This allows them to create ‘a feast for the eyes’, a moment that evokes an experience of transience. Haptic perception is more about the experience of a temporary succession of senses. How can we help people to experience ‘furniture’ differently from our present fleeting form of perception?


  • Sensitivity, Hapticality, Perception

  • 'Taal kan pas aangeraakt worden als het vormgegeven is’

  • Installation, collection of experiments

  • Students of Beeld en Taal department


  • This project is a pure and direct reaction to the content of Studium Generale’s Hold me Now. Beeld en Taal will run a fully equipped editing of ce on the spot during the conference-week to produce live reactions that result in physical and printed matter.


  • Braille, Tentacular, Perception, Scanning, Senses

  • To shape a fragrance

  • Glass, beeswax, Vaseline, squid ink, burnt paper

  • Aleksi Marjamaa, Erno Takala, Johan Ibrahim Adam, Hyo Jung Choi, Liesl Roos, Linda Da Costa, Marika Konstantinidou

  • The Large Glass

  • To smell is to be touched upon one another within an invisible field. Yet we often try to cover our bodily fragrances. In this project we explore the boundaries in direct physical touch and the indirect touch between multiple bodies. We create these bodies from glass to enable the transparency and fragility of the material to speak about these aspects within the field of touch. A lot of scents are released from the tools and from our own bodies while processing glass. In our project we want the audience to be touched through the fragrances we relate to the making of glass.


  • Intimacy, Scent, Sence

  • Joystick

  • Video installation

  • Alexis Stephenson, Birce Dar, Chandra Conforti, Columba Williams, Jesper Dobbeling, Yvonne ’t Hoen

  • Supervisor: Tim Breukers
  • Ceramics

  • In the work Joystick the Ceramics department uses different media to push the boundaries of clay and expand aesthetic playfulness by reconstructing the joystick. Technically and ideologically, a joystick is a device which fits the hand, used to control the digital world.In Joystick it is taken out of its regular context and re-conceptualized, as a monumental raw clay sculpture and is seen to be controlling the “real world”. Sketch-like sculptures are transferred into a 3D virtual world and take on technical glitches to give them new identities. Our senses are brought back to concepts where we wander between the physical and digital worlds.


  • Joystick

  • MOOFMOOFMOOF

  • A pop-up group movement

  • Performers: Charles Debord, Dick Alle Huppes, Elia Kalogianni, Joost Koster, Juni Mun, Lucie Gérard, Mees van Amesfoort, Meis Vranken, Renée van Zadelhoff, Théo Ader, Vanille Ougen

    Technical support:
    Asia Skupinska, Emile Weisz, Henrik Rakitin, Lucien Easton, Zep Nieuwenhuijs

  • VAV – moving image

  • Who is the artwork? A choir of bodies, holding hands, using a device as an ear, voyeurism, watch and being watched, a Snapchat intervention, a pop-up sharing of intimate flesh.


  • Awakening Dead Flesh, Private Scenes, Whispering Voices, Blood Bending, Professional Hugging, Sticking Together, Analogue Touch, Hilarious Things, Furry Stuff, Tactile Départ

  • Cringe - The Anticipation of Touch

  • Video, sound & still images

  • First-year Students of the Photography department


  • Cringe - The Anticipation of Touch is an investigation into the subconscious, pre-programmed, visually and sonically informed anticipation of touch.The project works with immersive 3d binaural sound recordings, as used in ASMR videos in combination with video footage of everyday domestic actions. How can an image or sound evoke a physical reaction, make our hair stand up or give us an adrenaline rush? Personal space is defined by physical proximity. Sound, however, is suggestive and capable of shifting imaginary distances. In this work, the anticipated moment of recognition is met with a surreal sense of the unfamiliar, and the juxtaposition of image and sound is a provocation of the senses.


  • Phantom Sensitivity

  • I am my hands

  • Duvet suits

  • Ilse Stokman

  • DOGtime

  • I am my hands is an intimate physical experience which aims to (re)instate connectedness of the body and mind. It involves human-shaped over-the-head-to-toe coveralls made of duvet materials which offers participants an insight into space, time and connection through means of touch.


  • Touch, Intimacy, Experience

  • The Boundary of Things

  • Silicone, plaster, sound, light, light sensors

  • Lianne van Roekel

  • DOGtime

  • The Boundary of Things contains a haptic interface mediating light and sound. By interconnecting vision, hearing and touch, our visual world, in which touch plays an inferior role, is temporarily moved aside. It’s an interplay of the senses in which the inanimate and animate, the static and the everlasting changing world, the organic and inorganic are sensed and questioned. The artwork therefore becomes an instrument to playfully search for boundaries and balance. I invite you to touch with hesitation and to hesitate through touch.


  • Interface, Senses, Balance

  • WHAT I NEED TO KNOW

  • Video (loop, 4.59 minutes)

  • Thom van Rijckevorsel

  • DOGtime

  • Hands knead a piece of clay. The clay is a constantly changing greenscreen onto which the same video is transferred just a split second ahead. The hands are trying to get a grip on the material, but the material is always one step ahead. The image refers to questions of personal autonomy and control in the age of algorithms.


  • Video, Hands, Clay

  • Alien hands

  • Mixed Media

  • Elena Giolo

  • Fine Arts

  • Our bodies betray us everyday, when our inner emotions speak on our behalf. There is a moment in which, as a growing disease, part of our bodies takes over – like a machine unable to connect to its own software. Within this contradiction, the dialogue between the spontaneity of the movement and the regulation of the mind, a risk of truth arises.


  • Involuntary Movement, Merge, Body, Anomaly, Signs, Hand, Force

  • Concrete binding

  • Installation; clay, street tiles (concrete)

  • Garance Früh

  • Fine Arts

  • 'The clay feels cold and wet against my skin, each of my movements leave a trace in it. I form in order to deform; new shapes appear between my body and the body of the city. Clay is a binder that allows my materiality to be united to the world’s materiality; I loosen up my contours in an attempt to meet the ground. But all I can feel is concrete.'


  • Gesture, Body, Sensual Process

  • Polyps


  • Hyeonju Lee & Niklas Büscher

  • Fine Arts

  • Situated at the threshold of slippery amateur porn and soothing nature documentary, Polyps imagines the sensual life of sea anemones and their befriended species. In the great, wet interiority that is the sea, beings are revealed inseparable as lifelong dependencies of feel and touch. Subjectivity emerges headlessly in between flora and fauna, molar and molecular, inside and outside.


  • Sucking, Selfing, Symbiosis

  • Dripping Legends


  • Xenia Perek & Nazanin Karimi

  • Fine Arts & Sandberg Institute alumna

  • Dripping Legends questions the digital perception of sensorial experiences such as pain, aggression, compassion, and supportive resentment towards an individual. Part movie, part video game – it is a work of choreography and an installation. The combined media enables the artists to transform into self-standing protagonists, liberated from their initial identity as a single performer, and to look for alternative ways to show relations among different moods and matters.


  • Affect, Body, Pain

  • 'that itch'

  • Spray paint and acrylics on MDF and canvas

  • Max Glader

  • Fine Arts

  • ‘There was a lot of lice in my grad school (sooo gross...). I remember hearing about classmates having lice and instantly getting that itch on my own head. A false reaction or more precisely a psychosomatic one.’ Max Gladers’ paintings are made with the intention to provoke a similar reaction. He exploits different textures to make them touchy and inviting yet sticky and repelling.


  • Touchy, Sticky, Itchy

  • UNDER THE AEGIS OF TENGRI


  • NOMINZIGGY

  • Fine Arts

  • Touching upon sources and topics from a Mongolian heritage in contrast to a European upbringing, NOMINZIGGY explores the physical properties and tactile qualities of materials in relation to the body, the non-human, and the mind. The core of the work is the Mongolian traditional garment, the deel, and triggered by its wide array of function and use. The essential aspect of this garment is its implementation in shamanistic rituals. In modern-day Mongolia shamans are gatekeepers, operating as mediators and messengers between the realm of the perceived world and worlds with which we are unable to interact, communicate, and touch – those beyond our conception.


  • Body, Perception, Hapticality, Manicures

  • Hunger


  • Valter Tornberg

  • Sound design: Andreas Tegnander Movement direction: Ingeborg Meier Andersen Performers: Filip Birkner and Finn Theuws
  • Fine Arts

  • Hunger considers the animal nature of humans and the hard-wired instincts that guide our behaviour. The project inspects the body as a vessel containing our evolutionary history, with the dangers and competition faced by our ancestors still present in our triggered physiological reactions today. The work takes place in a moment in which two humans undergo a conflict while stress mechanisms are taking control over their bodies. The violent touch acts as a catalyst for sparking the instinctive aggressive behaviour. Trapped in a time warp, the fight starts over and over again, never fully resolving.


  • Body, Contact, Skin

  • Bedtime Bullets

  • Glass, horse liniment, latex, metal, plastic, silicone

  • Oda Haugerud

  • Fine Arts


  • Body, Intimacy, Pain, Prothesis

  • Among ma face

  • Satin silk 32mm, clay

  • Laura Fernández Antolín

  • Fashion

  • Nowadays people are confronted with digital relations on a daily basis during which they easily lose affection, care, and voluminous awareness of their relatives. As a sensitive person Antolín’s memories are full of emotions and thoughts of experiences. Every gesture, smell, and touch remains stuck in her mind. Digital interfaces have a vulnerability, diffused and diluted. She made a watercolour portrait after a selfie she had sent to her boyfriend who lives elsewhere, while having pizza on late Friday evening. She manipulated and experimented with it so it can be worn.


  • Care, Feel, Interface

  • Past touch, Present form

  • Video installation with iPhone

  • Aleksandra Kwiatkowska

  • Graphic Design

  • In-between places and spaces, navigating interfaces. Here and there. Swipe right. Touch to switch. Mobility of life manifested via mobile. How far can one engage in tapping and pressing to, literally, stay in touch? Constructed from a mixed logic of memories, facts, and tensions, Aleksandra Kwiatkowska’s video is a fragmented account of her life exploring alternative mechanisms of belonging and presence. She is the subject of her own video, but at its completion she becomes a mere record of hand gestures. Can the friction between visible and invisible traces become tangible if you touch it?


  • Connection, Screen, Trace

  • Homunculus Gifty

  • Mascot made of various materials, sound

  • Manon Bachelier, Eliott Déchamboux, Kaspar Sellin

  • Credits: Lovis Caputo, Myrtille Vanmalle, Stephan Waslander
  • Graphic design

  • I’m ready! I’m ready! I’m ready-eady-eady-eady-eady!* Homunculus Gifty is running around, waving at you, dancing with you, smiling at you. Homunculus Gifty fancies the touch of the crowd, loves it if you take a pic, or if you grab its hand, or if you give a hug. The performance shall not stop, thus Homunculus Gifty gives it all. ’Til Homunculus Gifty cannot take it anymore… *Sponge Bob


  • Exhaustion, Free Hug, Paws

  • Cold Comforts

  • Video

  • Cleo Tsw & Philip Ullman

  • Graphic Design & VAV - moving image

  • Cold Comforts launches and reorientates the curiosities surrounding a voice-activated world. It para-theatrically attempts to locate a ‘body’ through question-and-answer, and in parallel ransacks and exteriorizes the aesthetic legitimacies of Flesh and Bone. Unreal, unpleasant, unwinding, until...


  • Activation, Feedback, Flesh

  • Pelosone #1, Pelosone #2, Pelosone #3, Pelosone #4, Pelosone #5, Pelosone #6

  • Latex, horse hair

  • Margherita Chinchio

  • Jewellery - linking bodies

  • Hundreds of apps on our smart devices allow us to quantify almost any sort of vital sign. This devotion to self-tracking, rather than increasing our personal awareness, reveals a loss of contact with our natural path and impulses. Margherita Chinchio’s personal (non-) digital watch, in contrast to the ‘quantified self’ notion, doesn’t track anything, but helps her stay in touch with personal timing and needs. The sense of touch is an intimate receptor and a powerful trigger that brings her far away from a multitasking era, providing an immediate connection with her inner identity and the world around her.


  • Feel, Time, Quantified-Self

  • On containing

  • Installation with ceramic objects and audio

  • Kim Lang

  • TXT (Textile)

  • ‘I throw you on the potters’ wheel I centre you You centre me My hands, my body, my mind are fully present Here with you A dance in reflection I press my fingers into your centre You open up I open up Two containers meeting each other I take you from the potters’ wheel Press your skin on mine My body contains your body Your body contains mine.’ Put on the headphones and press play, be led into a world of ceramic containers waiting to meet your skin, your body, your mind.


  • Mines and Marrow

  • Mixed media: performance & installation

  • Annie Åkerman & Cornelia Isaksson

  • credits: Nadja Voorham - performer/choreographer Moa Holgersson - performer/choreographer Carlos Añez - flute
  • VAV-moving image

  • If skin is the outer limit of bodily touch, will redefining its porous character increase its receptive capacity? Mines and Marrow unfolds as a tale that alters the realm of internal touch, from inside out, as above so below. A set invoking the heritage of protoscience, activated through narration and movement, to unclog the surface and infiltrate the pores. It is a choreography of tactile chymistry to open up and eventually stretch the sensory boundaries of the body.


  • Touch, Pore, Ferment, Absorb

  • Tactics and Tactilities

  • video programme

  • Kleoniki Stanich, Jaakko Myyri, Mathieu Mulder, Martina Gudmundson, Ebba Stoppelenburg, Kenneth Aidoo, Marie Sizorn, Qianfu Ye, Philip Ullman, Oded Rimon and Viktor Holst.

  • VAV-moving image

  • The VAV – moving image department presents a video programme developed for EYE on Art. In very different ways the participating students investigate the implications of the words Tactics and Tactilities by using all the tools video and film have to offer, including imagination, storytelling, and building constructions, but also costumes and props.