EXTRA CURRICULAR

Through collaborative efforts various independent Organisations (short and long term) are supported by the Sandberg Instituut. In relation to the two year Masters education, these Organisations consist of projects, programmes, exhibitions, publications and gatherings for both current students, alumni and staff as well as a professional audience and public with an interest in fine arts, design and architecture.

Commissioned-critique

Commissioned Critique is an ongoing series of essays commissioned by the Sandberg Instituut and semi-independently edited by Rosa te Velde and Michelle Kasprzak.

In these essays, various authors reflect on issues specific to artistic MA programmes in general, yet taking Sandberg as their main case study. The series aims to look critically at how to create learning environments that produce a generation of artists, designers and thinkers that can claim spaces in the real world and set their own agendas.

The goal of this series is to encourage deliberation and debate within Sandberg and among art schools more generally.

Extra-intra

Extra Intra is a website by the Editorial Board of Intercurricular Programs from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie/Sandberg Instituut & provides an overview of the academy's various intercurricular platforms, student initiatives & their events.

Hear! Here!

Hear! Here! is an experimental listening and dialogue platform that will work to encourage a culture of dialogue for students and staff of Rietveld and Sandberg.

The dialogue platform is co-organised by Sekai Makoni and Rosa te Velde and the editorial team which includes Rietveld and Sandberg teachers: Philip Coyne, Becket Flannery, Jason Hendrik Hansma, Tobias Karlsson, Martine Neddam, Iskra Vukšić & Simone Zeefuik.

Media Lab

The Medialab offers students a place to work, experiment with digital media, and gather knowledge. It is meant for all students to study, concentrate, collaborate, experiment, screenings and generally feel well.

Medialab’s staff organizes and facilitates workshops, lectures and events as well as audiovisual equipment rentals and technical production of exhibited works during the Sandberg Year Opening, Open Sandberg, Sandberg Graduation and various other exhibitions and presentations of the Sandberg students.

Research

Research at Sandberg Instituut is research that opens the possibilities of imagination. This means that questioning dominant paradigms becomes embedded in the way we approach learning, making and creating. Imagination that is not limited to the way things are but rather to the possibilities of what could be. We conceive of the institute as a place for interdisciplinary research and cross-pollination that exceeds the confines of conventional academic disciplines.

This perspective on research is grounded in a broad and encompassing practice that challenges conventional ways in which knowledges are produced. Drawing on critical pedagogy, critical making and emancipatory research, we give space to an environment that opens itself for different ways of producing and approaching knowledge. We believe in emancipatory research that does not require endorsement from institutions either academic or from civil society but research that operates independently and across disciplines driven by the needs of broad developments. No longer bound by canonical practices that dictate what is proper knowledge, we open ourselves up for the possibilities of the uncharted, those paths that have not yet been forged and do not yet have a space of institutional representation. This intentional subversion of canonical knowledge should not be confused with chaotic or non-rigorous research practices. On the contrary, we purposefully foster rigorous research from an emancipatory perspective based on principles of openness, empowerment, accountability and reciprocity.

In our search for new forms of engagement with research we work through de-centering and dislocating the traditional sources of knowledge to give way to what has always been relegated to the periphery. Knowledge, then, not as a top/down resource that is transmitted through authoritative practices but as part of shared experiences where the emphasis is put in searching together rather than in uncritical dominance.

Unsettling and Unions

Can Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Sandberg Instituut become radically inclusive structures?

In 2018, an intra-curricular initiative begins working actively between and beyond the structures and discourses of the academy to unsettle the Rietveld and Sandberg from the roots up.

Through collaboration, confrontation, conversation and complication, Unsettling Rietveld/Sandberg aims to support existing initiatives, while also developing outreach programs, drawing in new perspectives, and making the context of the academy more inclusive to other voices, minds and bodies — those who are here and those who are not, yet. Together with the dynamic input of students, staff, external advisors and management, Unsettling Rietveld/Sandberg will collectively generate a policy for equity and diversity in our institutes which aims to not only shift the ways we work together but also ask the question: who is the “we” in the first place? It’s one of the first steps towards becoming an academy of the 21st century in Amsterdam — an interdependent space for brave ideas and unlearning.