Stedelijk x Rietveld: Studium Generale

Events — 18, Mar 19, 2026

Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Gerrit Rietveld Academie present loVe making — love as a creative act and site of resistance, a multi-day event featuring lectures, presentations, screenings, and performances by international artists, theorists, and Rietveld students. loVe making explores love as a radical, political act: an embodied, collective force that redefines care, challenges power structures, and disrupts norms. Through performance, theory, and art, the conference examines how love shapes collaboration, repair, and resistance. Click here for more information.

Price: Museumticket + €3,- (per day)
Rietveld students with student ID get free admission on March 18 and 19
Location: Auditorium
Time: Mar 18, 1 pm until 5 pm
Mar 19, 11 am until 5 pm
Main language: English
Admission: Tickets

loVe making is a 1.5-day conference exploring love as a creative and political practice. The first afternoon, curated by If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, unfolds as an expanded reading – a constantly shifting atmosphere where text, performance, and artistic interventions merge. Drawing from a dramaturgy of moments, the programme weaves together live gestures, multimedia works, and critical reflections to explore love’s eruptive forces: its unproductive pleasures, embodied drives, and capacity to disrupt norms.

The second day, curated by Melanie Bühler, deepens the inquiry with critical dialogues on masculinity, patriarchy, and love as a transformative practice. Following bell hooks’ assertion that 'love is an action, never simply a feeling,' the conference positions love as a shared, urgent practice – one that reshapes culture, technology, and social norms.

Programme

Wednesday March 18

1 — 5 pm
Auditorium Stedelijk Museum

If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution – Notes on Spitting

For the first afternoon, If I Can’t Dance (with curators Sara Giannini and Anik Fournier) has invited writer and curator Daniel Blanga Gubbay to create a dramaturgy of moments drawn from his four-part Mousse Magazine column, Notes on Spitting, which explores the relationship between dance and choreography, and sex and pornography, merging theory and fiction within a 24-hour storyline. Notes on Spitting is presented as an expanded reading in which the text is interwoven with video works by Anchan / Anna Daučíková and Christina Della Giustina, an exhibition of drawings by Alina Popa (1982–2019), a score of ghostly gestures conceived by Alex Baczyński-Jenkins, and soundscapes by Krzysztof Bagiński that merge into a DJ set. The result is a constantly shifting atmosphere, exploring unproductive pleasures, sexual drives, non-phallic eroticism, and the eruptive forces of volcanoes and bodily movement.

Founded in Amsterdam in 2005, If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution is a women-led art organization dedicated to exploring performance and performativity in contemporary art. We work with artists, researchers, and activists to address the urgencies of the present through the embodied, time-based, and relational languages of performance. Our approach is rooted in intersectional feminisms, queer ecologies, disability justice, and decolonial methodologies. We understand performance not only as an artistic medium but as a mode of inquiry: interdisciplinary, tentacular, and centered on the body as a political tool and living archive.

To find out more about the contributing artists and theorists, visit love.rietveldacademie.nl

Thursday March 19

11 am — 5 pm
Auditorium Stedelijk Museum

Melanie Bühler – On Men, Love, and the Patriarchy

Crises of masculinity have been proclaimed periodically, and we are now arguably facing another. Among those reaffirmed by the current crisis are domineering, predatory men of a type that many had hoped to see relegated to history. In the wake of #MeToo, it’s as if a perverse reversal has occurred: perpetrators have been recast as victims, and through this 'victimhood' are now able to reassert their presence.

At its core, little of this is new: patriarchy is perhaps one of the oldest systems of all. Yet still the question is: how to respond? This one-day conference invites us to consider the possibilities, and to explore masculinity, patriarchy, sex, and love from multiple perspectives.

'What we need is an angel,' Simone de Beauvoir said, 'neither man nor woman—but where shall we find one?'

With: Eisa Jocson, choreographer/dancer, San Juan, La Union, Philippines; Reba Maybury, artist, Jutland and London; and Asa Seresin, writer/researcher, London

Melanie Bühler works as Curator of Contemporary Art Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Prior to her appointment at Stedelijk she was Senior Curator at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland and Curator Contemporary Art at Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem. Recent group exhibitions include Burning Down the House. Rethinking Family (2024), Image Power (2020) and Noise! Frans Hals, Otherwise (2018). Her exhibition Manosphere. Everyday Masculinities will open in April this year. She has curated exhibitions with artists including Sandra Mujinga, Jacqueline de Jong, Atiéna R. Kilfa, Anna Bella Geiger and Lubaina Himid. She is the editor of Burning Down the House. Rethinking Family (Hatje Cantz, 2023), The Art of Critique (Lenz Press/Frans Hals Museum, 2022), No Internet, No Art (Onomatopee, 2015) and co-editor of The Transhistorical Museum (Valiz/Frans Hals Museum, 2022). Her writing appears regularly in exhibition catalogues, publications and magazines.

For the bios of the contributing artists and theorists, visit: love.rietveldacademie.nl

About Studium Generale Rietveld Academie

Studium Generale Rietveld Academie is a transdisciplinary programme of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam that fosters critical and artistic inquiry. It explores how social, cultural, and political dynamics shape—and are shaped by—creative practice. Through annual themes like Radical Accessibility, Technodiversity, and Refuge, the programme brings together artists, scholars, and activists for lectures, performances, reading groups, workshops, and a public conference, creating shared spaces for learning and exchange.

Head of Programme / Curator-in-Chief: Jorinde Seijdel
Coördinator: Jort van der Laan
Project website: love.rietveldacademie.nl
Home website: studiumgenerale.rietveldacademie.nl