Recap: Studium Generale 2025 – Refuse Revive Regenerate
On Friday, May 16th, 2025, CARADT’s Studium Generale took place at the St. Joost School of Art & Design in Breda. Under the theme Refuse Revive Regenerate, the event offered an afternoon of workshops, masterclasses, and hands-on experiences that invited participants to explore regenerative futures and reflect on the role of education in shaping them.
An Afternoon of Regenerative Exploration
In an era defined by climate change, social polarization, and economic uncertainty, Studium Generale 2025 created a platform for collective imagination, hope, and action. Participants were encouraged to:
Engage with the principles of permacomputing
Reimagine artificial intelligence through indigenous knowledge systems
Learn to repair, plant, ferment, and bake
Explore the local environment and gather materials for artistic and design practices.
Highlights from the programme
Masterclasses
Studium Generale 2025 featured two critical masterclasses that opened up alternative ways of thinking about regeneration—both technologically and economically: ‘Regenerative AI’ and ‘Goodbye, Poverty Jetset!’
Regenerative AI A deep-dive into subversive and regenerative approaches to artificial intelligence. Through contributions by Eleanor Dare, Anna Nazo, Delfina Fantini van Ditmar, and Eke Rebergen, participants were invited to explore perspectives such as algorithmic resistance, indigenous AI, feminist servers, cosmotechnics, and permacomputing. Rather than celebrating the AI hype, the session asked: how can we reclaim and reimagine AI from within creative practice?
Goodbye, Poverty Jetset! A two-part session challenging the economic precarity of creative work. With input from Sepp Eckenhausen (CARADT) and Koen Bartijn (De Appel), the masterclass discussed alternative economic models for the arts—from basic income circles and studio co-ops to bottom-up policies and regenerative cultural practices.
Workshops
Ten hands-on workshops invited participants to reflect, act, and create through embodied learning and collective experimentation. From soil to sound, and from stitching to foraging, the workshops cultivated diverse ways of engaging with the theme Refuse Revive Regenerate:
Rewild & Ferment A foraging walk and fermentation workshop with Roos Konings, connecting seasonal plants, invasive species, and ecological regeneration through taste and practice.
Mending as Transformative Caring Practice Led by Sanne Koevoets, this session explored textile repair as a feminist and caring act—emphasising visible mending and embodied reflection.
Welcome to the Weird and the Dirty A subversive design workshop by Renée van Oploo and Rob Leijdekkers, inviting participants to embrace creative mess, alter egos, and material disruption.
Regenerative Narrative Through the lens of the Cotton in Common project, Karen Janssen and Tahis Marti challenged participants to craft stories of change using visual and emotional storytelling.
How to Decide Collectively Tara Karpinski introduced quadratic voting and co-governance tools, enabling participants to explore democratic decision-making in collaborative settings.
In focus: Garden Encounters
Led by researchers Annemarie Piscaer and Jochem van Laarhoven, Garden Encounters invited participants to “listen about, with, and through the garden and its inhabitants.”
The session took place entirely within the living ecosystem of the St. Joost academy garden. Through close observation and collaborative soil mapping, participants explored one square metre of earth in detail—discovering the tension between care and ownership, and asking what it means to relate ethically to more-than-human life.
By “zooming in a thousand times,” the workshop prompted a shift in scale and perspective, encouraging participants to meet the garden not as observers, but as part of its dynamic web of relations. The workshop is part of Piscaer’s ongoing research project Terroir, which explores how we relate to the wild through material engagement.
Studium Generale 2025 created space for more-than-human dialogue and multispecies collaboration. The day served as a reminder that regeneration is not a fixed outcome, but a continuous process—something we practice, embody, and imagine together.
The event concluded with a communal dinner—the culmination of the workshop The Regenerative Cantina: a four-day workshop by Loran van der Wier culminating in the event’s closing dinner. Participants harvested vegetables, fermented ingredients, baked bread, and collectively shaped a regenerative meal experience.
This shared meal not only provided nourishment, but also served as a ritual moment of reflection. Participants exchanged stories, shared insights from the day’s workshops, and listened to a sound composition generated during de workshop Transformation by Means of Sound: with Maxim Ventulé, participants created a collective sound piece through experimentation, reuse, and improvisation.
To mark the end of the day, the poet-in-residence Marinda Pieron shared (a part of) her poetic report about the day’s experiences and atmospheres. The full version of this poem, titled Poetic Report SG 2025, is now available in Dutch and English to read.
Thank you to all contributors, facilitators, and participants for making this edition a truly inspiring and collective act of regeneration.
Credits
Photography: Bregje Goorts
Videography: Shimin Chan
Reporting: Marinda Pieron
Design: Doortje den Hartigh
Moderators: Eva Fotiadi & Max Receveur
Curators: bas van den hurk & Wander Eikelboom
Production: Rikst Westra
Extra thanks to Melike Karaslan and Niels van Rijsbergen
Studium Generale(s)
During this annual event, the lectorates of CARADT’sresearch groups present their research. The day-long programme of lectures and workshops is organised for students of St. Joost School of Art, Design & Technology and the Communication & Multimedia Design programme at Avans University of Applied Sciences in Breda and Den Bosch. Studium Generale has been organised by CARADT since 2017. The programme is structured in such a way that students are introduced to the research that is carried out at CARADT in an active and investigative way.
‘How can art and design cultivate critical expressions rooted in ethics of care and relationality to influence ecological, social, and economic structures?’
Delfina Fantini van Ditmar, PhD, focuses on ecological design and reflective practices as Professor Regenerative Art and Design. With a background in biology and design research, she explores paradigm shifts and material ethics, advancing regenerative and more-than-human perspectives
‘People are the product of their relationships with their environment. It’s important to understand how technological developments influence these relationships.’
Michel van Dartel is Research Professor Situated Art, Design and Technology at the Avans Centre of Applied Research for Art, Design and Technology (CARADT) and was affiliated with V2_Lab for the Unstable Media between 2005-2024. He holds an MSc in cognitive psychology and a PhD in artificial intelligence.
‘Our research group investigates the role artists, designers and cultural producers in general can play in developing the aesthetics and poetics of a desirable future.’
Sebastian Olma is professor Cultural and Creative Industries. He works for the Expertise Centre Art, Design and Technology.
‘How do we live together, how do we work together? How do we give shape and form to ‘being together’ in the broadest sense?’
bas van den hurk is an artist, tutor and researcher. He studied Fine Art at Academy St. Joost in Breda and Philosophy of Aesthetics at the University of Amsterdam. van den hurk teaches contemporary theory, research and practice at St. Joost, and is a regular lecturer at different academies and institutions in the Netherlands and abroad.
