Welcome to the Studium Generale Rietveld Academie website! To encourage critical making and thinking, Studium Generale offers a diverse and transdisciplinary programme every year on an urgent theme. Read more about the set-up and structure here.

This website consists of 3 substantive and informative layers that constantly feed each other.

The Programme Overview home page displays announcements of ongoing events and activities, and provides instant access to their live streams when appropriate.

Below the Programme overview is the Archive Picks area, which presents varying selections of older programme contributions, curated by guests or by ourselves. Older contributions can thus regain attention or meaning, or be presented in alternative arrangements.

At the bottom is the Archive. There you will find material from 2011 to the present: part of the video-recorded contributions to the annual conference of Studium Generale and since March 2020 also recordings of events and presentations of the preliminary programmes. The archive is searchable in various ways and offers a chronological overview of previous editions and links to the associated project websites. It also contains announcements and descriptions of previous programme components, which can no longer be relived, but do provide some glances in the histories of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie.

The purpose of the website is to inform and present what is happening at the moment, but it is also a memory, in which a lot can be found and unexpected encounters can take place.

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N.B. This website is still under construction! Not everything has been completed yet and the search functions in the Archive are not yet fully functional.

Trauma and Disentanglement as a Neural Possibility
Franco "Bifo" Berardi

A process of traumatic barbarianism seems to be underway: politics is unable to stop it, as it has stepped beyond the point of no return. The global civil war is proceeding together with a process of automation of cognitive activity. The trauma will not be a mere cultural breakdown, but it will possibly evolve into a neurogenetic transformation whose forms and meaning may be shaped by therapeutic and aesthetic action. As the trauma is going to transform the relation between emotional and cognitive in the neurosphere, will it be the condition for autonomy of knowledge and communist solidarity of cognitive workers?

Franco Berardi Bifo is a contemporary writer, media theorist and activist. He founded the magazine A/traverso (1975-1981) and was part of the staff of Radio Alice, the first free pirate radio station in Italy (1976-1978). In the ‘70 and '80s he worked with Felix Guattari in the field of schizoanalysis. His last book is AND. Phenomenology of the End (Semiotexte, 2015)