Studium Generale 2024-25 explores the accessibility of art and cultural practices through a ‘Crip’ perspective. This approach emphasizes interdependency, mutual solidarity, and shared responsibility among our diverse bodies and minds. Once a term used negatively to describe people with disabilities, ‘Crip’ has been reclaimed by artists, activists, and scholars as a positive and empowering term, akin to ‘queer.’ It challenges harmful norms and prejudices and examines how disability intersects with gender, race, class, sexuality, and the environment, encouraging us to consider these connections on both personal and political levels.
Despite this, numerous barriers persist in our daily lives and learning environments. Many spaces remain inaccessible due to poor design and a lack of adequate accommodations and tools. Educational materials often marginalize or overlook diverse voices and bodyminds. By working with Crip artists, activists, and thinkers, we aim to reimagine the academy, our community, and our artistic practices through this Crip lens. How can we make accessibility a core aspect of our learning, thinking, and creating, rather than an afterthought or add-on?
Studium Generale Rietveld Academie is a programme of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam that fosters independent thinking and creation through theory, reflection, and imagination. With an intersectional approach, it examines power structures and cultural and artistic narratives. Each year, the programme explores an urgent theme through transdisciplinary research, engaging Rietveld students, artists, theorists, and activists in lectures, performances, workshops, and more. Previous themes have included Resilient Bodies, Oceanic Imaginaries, Refuge, and Technodiversity.