Rietveld Academy: Love Bit[e]s

The works are loosely connected to the topic of love making, which explores love as a creative act and a site of resistance. The program is grounded in the idea that the way we live shapes how we think about love. It is not just a feeling, but something culture teaches us, shaped by apps and social rules, and something that keeps our economic system running. At the same time, love can break those patterns, acting as a force for care, connection, and for pushing back against what controls us.

The works speculate on love making as an unruly practice: tender and fierce, collective and embodied—an invitation to love against power, to make and remake worlds otherwise. They challenge us to consider: "How can we love-make-mobilise-repair-disrupt together?" (Upcoming Program Studium Generale Rietveld 2026).

The presented works show a diversity of free-form experiments that invite us into the students' personal narratives, contextualizing them within their lived experiences. These various aspects give the spectator a peek into the daily lives of these young people, exploring their experiences and emotions in a thought-provoking manner, in both a physical and mental sense.

What we see repeatedly in this young international community is an attempt to connect with a cross-cultural humanity in these times of polarization.