Talk

Art and Craft Lectures: Rick Dolphijn: As We Are Floating in the Amniotic Sea

Sigmund Freud famously compared the Dutch eagerness to build dikes, and to erase the water from its polders to how the Ego desires to conquer the Id. It seemed a key feature of Modern Man: the drive to conquer the unknown, possibly to destroy it, at least to demand it to speak (in our language), to make it respond to our needs. In hindsight, we could argue that this drive comes down to sowing off the branch on which we sit on. The times in which we live now, demand us to rethink the sea. In this lecture, therefore, my aim is to affirmatively explore the sea in how it embodies all life, protects it, and connects it.

Rick Dolphijn is a writer and a philosopher interested in new materialism, posthumanism, the contemporary arts and material culture. He is an Associate Professor at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and an Honorary Professor at the University of Hong Kong.

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The Art and Craft Lectures is an annual lecture series devoted to art education and research that stresses an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the relationship between art, theory, and politics. The series, part of the MFA programs in the department, invites scholars, artists, and curators from different disciplines to give a public lecture as well as to partake in an in-depth colloquium of readings and close engagement with students and faculty’s research and practice.
The fall 2022 series, curated by Sara Yazdani and Susanne M. Winterling in dialogue with faculty, is devoted to sensing with the objective to rethink knowledge, body, and practice through aesthetics, perception, matter, and ecologies, beyond the traditional humanities. It takes the form of traditional keynotes that guides the semester, and as a platform for students and faculty to share and discuss practice, concerns, and inspiration, with an open door to the public.