Hold Me Now - Feel and Touch in an Unreal World

Four-days conference-festival curated by guest curators who have each inaugurated a discursive and performative program on how the haptic—relating to or based on touch—is thought and experienced artistically, philosophically, and politically in life, art and design, and theory.

How do we feel and more specifically touch in our technologically mediated dematerialized digital cultures? Do we solely stroke and swipe our screens? How are the body and its feel involved? Are we in fact cultivating different tactilities in relation to the world and others? Further, how can we trace the ways in which touch informs and reforms the body with respect to violence, gender, sexuality, democracy, and identity? If art and design have privileged sight and sound, should touch—and all the senses—be addressed and activated in order to help us stay ‘in touch’ with our bodies and the material world?

March 21
Vernissage featuring Rietveld Uncut, an annual joint presentation of art projects by the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, forming an ongoing setting for the symposium.

March 21
Karen Archey: “Practicing Care”
“Practicing Care” considers the role of care, empathy and interdependence within professional and creative spheres. Featured speakers include artists who work with concepts relating to visibility, disability and community solidarity, as well as experts in the field of curatorial practice, disability studies and affect theory. 

Participants: Mirthe Berentsen, Jesse Darling, Joseph Grigely, Carolyn Lazard, Luke Willis Thompson.

March 22
Mark Paterson: “Haptics, Creativity, and Knowledge Between Bodies”
Scientific processes of sensory mapping, the engineering of the interface, electrical and electronic entertainments, and the use of the body in performance each in their own way involve a creative approach to knowledge production: creative arrangements of the senses, translations between modalities, a realm of experimentation in the service of knowing more about bodies, senses, and space. Increasingly, social science understands the importance of such sensory knowledge production, and involves its own creative methodologies and approaches when it comes to bodies and their boundaries. The day will consist of talks and demonstrations around touch, haptics, and performance.  

Participants: Kate Elswit, Anna Harris, Carey Jewitt, David Parisi, Stahl Stenslie.

March 23
Rizvana Bradley: “There’s a Tear in the World: Touch After Finitude”
Touch has enabled us to enrich our techniques of knowing, making possible a rediscovery of the modalities of movement, matter, and sense that comprise our subject and object worlds. Weaving between image, sound, and the poetic line, the conversations in this conference day will navigate the overlaps and cuts between them. The included readings, performances, and talks will explore diasporic forms of world-making, dynamic philosophies of movement, the violence of cartographic and architectural imaginaries, the material trace of touch in economies of performance, and the haptic violence manifested in history’s archival inscriptions.

Participants: Hortense Spillers, Eyal Weizman, Aracelis Girmay, Erin Manning, Ligia Lewis, Wu Tsang, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

Jack Halberstam: ”Reach out and Touch (Somebody’s Hand): Feel Philosophies”
Reaching out remains an important gesture within the political repertoire of queer and trans subjects who centre the body and its desires, needs, limits, and potential. Situating the body as itself a project of crafting, making, building, and unravelling, the “Reach Out and Touch” talks and performances explore the physics of touch, gestural repertoires of grasping and feeling, the aesthetics of the handmade, the limits of sensory perception, the social dynamics of bodily regimes of doing, making, and exploring. In addition, we will think about the haptic body in time and space.

Participants: Karen Barad, boychild, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Mel Y. Chen, Paul B. Preciado, Jeanne Vaccaro.

Framework
Studium Generale Rietveld Academie, an exploratory theory programme aimed at all departments, open to the public.

Chief curator: Jorinde Seijdel
Assistant curator: Jort van der Laan