Activity name: Open studios Social Practice: Artistic Ecologies.
Total number of participants: 1850 (Opening night)
Total number of artists: 15
The Rijksakademie presented the outcomes of the two-year project Artistic Ecologies at the annual Open Studios. During this event, the Rijksakademie opened its doors to welcome a broad public, with audiences of over 8,000 visitors coming from the Netherlands and abroad.
The Rijksakademie’s contribution to Artistic Ecologies was centred on the activities of the Social Practice Workshop, in exchange with our partners, over topics of eco-social practices, ways in which artists were working with ecosystems, and degrowth. The exhibition both presented projects developed on different sites in Amsterdam (Peng Zhang’s residency in the Groene Veld, collaboration with the Poetry Circle and the community centre Nowhere, and the We Sell Reality project at Framer Framed) and also reflected the engagement with the partners and materials generated through the workshop with Pablo Martinez, who had been engaged with both WHW and the Rijksakademie during the process of the project.
The exhibition fed an ongoing archive of social practice that was being developed at the Rijksakademie. The exhibition opened for the press and the internal community of resident artists on 28 May, and for the Amsterdam Art Week audiences (est. 2,000) on 29 May, as well as further public days of the open studios on 30 and 31 May. On public days, we welcomed a broad range of audiences, including school and student groups.
Social practice is an approach to art-making that focuses on engagement through human interaction and social discourse, co-creation with specific audiences, and critical interventions in social systems. It is about connecting and involving people, bringing them into a creative process. In 2021, the Rijksakademie appointed a social practice specialist to develop a facility with a double function: to support artists with practices that foreground the social, with an emphasis on exchange through practice, and as a tool to connect our work to the wider social sphere and community. The primary function has been advising residents with social practices, which often focuses on how to enter different social contexts, how to collaborate ethically, and to recognize the complexity of positioning and power dynamics between artists, participants, and institutional frameworks.
In the Open Studios, an archive of social practices was presented by guest resident Reza Afisina, a member of the Indonesian collective Ruangrupa, in collaboration with residents and team members of the Rijksakademie. During the Open Studios, the residents exhibit their works and shared how they have developed their practices and explored new territories, in and beyond the art field. A live streaming station from lumbung radio was installed in the exhibition space, where in the form of podcast (or ‘podzines’), a series of readings, records and experimental sounds connected to the various collective experiences at the Rijksakademie and Social Practice workshop was presented. The audience included artists, curators, students, supporters, community workers and activists engaged in past and present collaborations with the Rijksakademie and the Social Practice Workshop.