Gerrit Rietveld Academie Jewellery-Linking Bodies

2025

Photo Amy Sou Wu, photo credit: Roel van Tour @roel_van_tour

As we approach the close of the 2024/25 academic year, we are pleased to invite you to the final edition of our In Dialogue -Tuesday Afternoon Talks with our guests Amy Suo Wu and Sebastiaan Kramer.

Amy Suo Wu is an artist, designer, and educator based in Rotterdam. Born in Shantou 汕头 and raised in Western Sydney, her current work explores mending as both metaphor and method, the intersection of text and textile, and publishing as an embodied practice. She collaborates with her mother, Maria Ling Qing Huang, in the research project Serenity Department, focused on intergenerational mending. Her previous body of work on steganographic practices as acts of protection, survival, and resistance in the face of oppression and violence is now published under the title A Cookbook of Invisible Writing (Onomatopee). Amy has been involved in community initiatives such as Zine Camp (2014-2019) and has taught at the Piet Zwart Institute, Sandberg Institute, and currently at Willem de Kooning Academy.

Sebastiaan Kramer is a fashion entrepreneur and curator. A graduate of ArtEZ (2005), he co-founded the circular fashion label Hul le Kes, where he remains general director. He now also serves as Curator of Body-Related Design at Museum Arnhem, responsible for its fashion and jewelry collection and related programming. Deeply invested in Arnhemกฏs creative scene, he has launched numerous initiatives including Stock Days Arnhem, Sustainable Fashion 025, and the Rhine District, and was creative director of the Fashion + Design Festival Arnhem until 2024.

We look forward to welcoming you and our guests for yet another thoughtful exchange about Jewellery and beyond.

Join us on
Tuesday 13th of May, 16:00-18:00
At the Jewellery- Linking Bodies department
1st floor Rietveld Building (room 007)
Gerrit Rietveld Academie 
Frederik Roeskestraat 96
1076 ED Amsterdam

EXHIBITION Opening: Friday, May 9, 17:00 – 21:00

We’re sinking deeper into our pillows, gliding through imagined scapes. As flesh fades, bones are given words. They use them to gossip about skin’s softness and reminisce on bearing weight. Within dreams, bodies morph with certainty. Our legs evaporate into clouds, our fingers run through screensaver fields, our hearts beat at the rhythm of an eight a.m. alarm.

The Jewellery – Linking Bodies Department wonders what dreams our bones dream. In this exhibition we explore the permanence of imagination. Join us as we wander.

Will you wonder too? 


Opening May 9, 17:00 – 21:00
Exhibition Duration:
May 9, 17:00 – 21:00
May 10, 12:00 – 18:00

Hannah Falcone
Melwin Funk
Dana Haire
Isabel Heatley
Anne-Sophie de Lange
June Querido
Niloofar Salehi
Hung-Fu Tsai

Location:
4bid gallery at OT301
Overtoom 301, 1054 JL Amsterdam
Map >

May 2025

This workshop proposes a sustained, critical engagement with Physarum polycephalum – a non-neural, decentralized organism that resists classification and yet continues to capture the speculative imagination across disciplines. Neither metaphor nor specimen, the blob is approached here as a material operator: a being whose presence unsettles, whose behavior invites thought, and whose slimy form exposes the limits of anthropocentric knowledge systems.

The condition of being slimy – viscous, ungraspable – has long carried moral, aesthetic, and political weight. In philosophy and cultural discourse, slime appears at the threshold between form and body, self and other, pure and impure. It disturbs categorical clarity and often signals the presence of something transgressive, toxic, or threatening. Slime, in this sense, is not merely a substance but a semiotic crisis, a material affect that binds disgust and attraction in the same gesture.

This workshop invites participants to engage with the blob through modes of witnessing, proximity, and discomfort, rather than control or explanation. We will work through the affective entanglements that slime provokes – revulsion, fascination, care, unease – foregrounding how these responses are shaped by cultural codes, power structures, and epistemological habits.

Drawing from new materialism, feminist theory, relational ontology, we will consider what it means to learn in the presence of an organism that eludes mastery. What does it mean to be ethically implicated by something that cannot be fully known or possessed? How might discomfort become the generative ground for reflection and change? In an era marked by ecological precarity and systemic breakdown, we explore the possibility that it is not hope or certainty, but shared fear and unease, that opens space for collective transformation.

Virág Szálas-Motesiczky (b. 1990, former Czechoslovakia) is an artist-researcher whose work interrogates the material and symbolic residues of post-socialist transition. Her practice investigates how notions of collectivity, transgenerational customs, and geopolitical traces co-produce social imaginaries, asking why historical legacies continue to delimit prospective futures. Combining archival excavation with situated fieldwork, she frames objects and sites as epistemic actors that reveal entanglements among governance, memory, and material agency.
Educated at Design Academy Eindhoven (foundation) and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (BFA), she co-founded a speculative studio dedicated to collaborative modes of inquiry, located in a converted Protestant church in the Netherlands. In September 2025, she will enter the Master Education in Arts program at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, where she turns to pedagogy as a critical technology for collective problem-solving and the creation of equitable space. By embedding artistic research within participatory learning environments, she aims to cultivate transdisciplinary publics capable of re-imagining socio-ecological relations beyond anthropocentric paradigms through group dynamics and collective narratives.

https://motesiczky.com/