Studium Generale is an academy-wide platform for second year students at KABK that is intended to expose you to relevant discourses and dialogues occurring within and adjacent to art and design practices. Each cycle focuses on a specific topic or theme organized by a curator/researcher.

Semester 2, Overwintering, curated by Jules Davis Dufayard and Angela Jerardi, brings together artistic and academic contributions to learn from crip time, carework, and mutual aid, and asks us to connect these practices to more-than-human livelihoods. Thinking through chronopolitics, Overwintering will reflect on ideas of slowness and idleness both in a potentially liberating or anticapitalist frame, in which bodies do not behave and resist capture, but also through debility, chronic illness and the obscuring capacities of slow violence. The daily activity book & reader is intended as a tool to attune ourselves to the seasonal time of late winter, to encourage students to intentionally slow down and make space for rest.

Semester 2, 2024 - 2025: Overwintering

For spring 2025, Studium Generale will be organized as 6 sessions hosted in the Auditorium and an activity book & reader that is available to be picked up in the KABK library. The structure of Studium Generale asks that students devote 3 hours of self-study for each week’s session. For this iteration of Studium Generale the self-study activities will be centered on rest and hibernation.

Doors open at 18:00, the performances & lectures start at 18:15:

(all events are free and most are open to the public)

Cover image: Desentierros, Lina Bravo Mora, 2022. Image description: line drawing of a human body crouching over a mountainous landscape. The body is made of layers of rock, sand, soil and vegetation.

This is a time when a virus' flight across the globe has led to 6% of the world's population experiencing debilitating unresolved long-term fatigue, sometimes indefinitely. This is a time when walking down a street while Black can cost you your life. This is a time when attending a protest in a privileged democracy in Europe can lead to bodily injury. This is a time when the death and maiding of a people can be live-streamed on a social media platform, “democratically” available for anyone to watch from anywhere in the world, but the power to stop it seems to be held in the hands of only a very few.

Maybe you recently decided to get a stainless-steel water bottle, to avoid BPA plastic because of its cancer-causing properties, and yet each of our bodies already contain a multitude of microplastics. Maybe when grocery shopping last evening, you chose the biologically-grown cucumber, but it comes sealed in a plastic sleeve and was grown under lights in a greenhouse. Perhaps you wanted the organic avocado, but it was three times the cost and flew here from Peru. Sometimes the stress of everything feels like it's getting to you, so you want to see a therapist but the one covered by insurance has a six-months-long waiting list. Your tutor wants to know how your work has developed since they saw you last week, but you just pulled three-night shifts in a row and your rent is due the day after tomorrow. Everyone is busy. Everything is urgent. And everyone is tired.

Every human and most mammals gestated into being via a tiny ocean in the womb. This sounds rather blissful, but arriving into the world is a messy affair. Blood, bodily tissue, millions of microbes, and either yours or your mother's excrement arrive with each and every one of us as we come into being. (1) The ongoing business of living is no less messy and entangled. Why then do so many of us misunderstand our bodies as autonomous? Can we listen to what writer Vanessa Machado de Oliveira teaches us? – “understand that the earth is not an extension of our bodies, it's the other way around”. (2) Bodies are vulnerable, fragile, fallible things; most of all, despite our efforts to distract ourselves from it, life is entangled and inherently precarious. If we are able to understand that having a body means that life is defined by its precarity, then it follows that we–like all beings–are dependent on structures of support and care for our survival, not as an exception, but as an ongoing necessity. (3) So why is it that within normative discourses, care, support and accommodation of our bodies is articulated as exceptional, as something outside the norm? Often it is identified as a personal failure or an impairment that needs fixing, rather than a societal imperative for support.

In her ongoing work examining debility – honey in on the uneven forces at work that afford power to some bodies to kill and maim the bodies of others, Jasbir K. Puar asks a simple question: “What is an able body in this context? What is a non-disabled body, and is it the same as an able body?” (4) We want to ask: what if there are no abled bodies? What if it's not any of our bodies that needs to be changed, but the world that needs fixing? (5)

In imagining and planning this programme, we want to acknowledge and honor friends and colleagues who have aided us in developing these ideas, notably Crip the Curriculum's past and current programmes at Rietveld Academie, the organizers and contributors of Written in the Body at Rietveld Academie, the Ecologies of Transformation Master programme at Sandberg Instituut, and the Wxtch Craft and Earth Craft series hosted here at KABK's Studium Generale. We invite you to dig into the archives of these programmes (and CTC's upcoming events with Rietveld's Studium Generale) in parallel to the Overwintering programme. As Crip Studies and Disability Justice seem ascendent as topics in Dutch art institutions, we want to ask ourselves how to engage with these practices in an active and implied way. How, in other words, are these ideas implemented as ongoing practices that change lived conditions, rather than lofty ideals shared as abstract proposals or performative gestures? Part of our intention with this programme is to ask institutions, and all of us who participate in these institutions, to reflect on how we are intentionally or unintentionally upholding ableist norms and how to participate in repair. Our aim for this 6-week programme is to hold space for practicing alternatives to individualizing, competitive, exploitative, burn-out culture. Grounding the programme with the seasonal time of late winter is an attempt of an antidote, towards attuning to lying fallow and attending to idleness.

This programme is designed by guest artists/researchers Jules Davis-Dufayard and Angela Jerardi.

1 Less of the microbes (and excrement) can join you if you arrive by cesarean section surgery.
2 Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism (North Atlantic Books, 2021), 60.
3 Johanna Hedva, “Sick Woman Theory,” Topical Cream, March 12, 2022, https://topicalcream.org/features/sick-woman-theory/ .
4 Jasbir K. Puar, “Hands Up, Don't Shoot”, The New Inquiry, September 15, 2017, https://thenewinquiry.com/hands-up-dont-shoot/
5 Hedva, “Sick Woman Theory”.

Tea and biscuits will be provided.

Please bring a blanket/cushion/mat to get comfortable. We will bring a few extra blankets and cushions, but the chairs will be basic wooden chairs, some of them with armrests.

Due to the large group and limited time, we usually won't plan official collective breaks in the schedule. You are free to quietly move around and in and out of the room at any time, and there will be some transition moments favorable for taking breaks.

The entrance of the auditorium itself is wheelchair accessible.

There is a wheelchair accessible toilet in the toilets just outside the auditorium.

Though there is a step-free route including a short, steep ramp from a side entrance of the building to the auditorium, the wider KABK building is not easily accessible for wheelchair users. Please check this page for more info.

The guest artists' performances/lectures will have sound amplification. We ask that attendees refrain from talking while a guest, host or student is already talking with a mic. A few printed copies of the artists’ scripts will be available for each event, or upon request by email afterwards: overwinteringschool@gmail.com.

Semester 1 2024 - 2025: Commoning

Studium Generale is the platform KABK offers you in your second year to exchange the ways you learn and to get to know specialists from outside of the academy.

Multidisciplinary teamwork, assignments made through collaboration, collaboration and crosspollinations between different working perspectives are vital for commoning.

Commoning is a practice of collaborating and sharing to meet daily needs and achieve well-being, of individuals, communities, and lived-in environments. (web source)

Regardless of the specific department or discipline you are studying; it is a relevant discourse.

With Studium Generale – academic year 2024-2025, semester 1 - we explore ‘Commoning’ in 5 sessions. We will approach this topic from both theoretical as well as pragmatical angles. For each session we ask 3 hours of self-study.