About

ABOUT

ARIAS is a platform that promotes and facilitates research through the arts and sciences. It fosters the development of artistic research around current and emerging topics such as climate change, artificial intelligence, and practices of care. Its focus lies in creating a community of practitioners by activating and expanding a network of artists and researchers. Working to give context, space, and voice to this network, the platform intends to nurture a diverse and sustainable research ecology among the institutions and organisations of education and knowledge in Amsterdam.

ARIAS develops research contexts by inviting researchers and artists to form working groups centred around a theme. Reflecting on urgent and complex issues of today’s world, these groups engage practitioners in collaborations that cross the boundaries of disciplines and bring together diverse methods of working.

By organising public events such as workshops, talks, and discussions, ARIAS seeks to give space to these working groups for talking, listening, and exploring their practices. Using scientific and artistic tools to approach emerging topics, these get-togethers aim to promote transdisciplinary collaborations for generating ways of knowing that would not be possible otherwise.

As a platform, ARIAS aims to give voice to those new modes of thinking. Cultivating this website into an expanding public resource for artistic research, it aspires to provide an emerging ecology of practices. Centred around creating events that are open and accessible, ARIAS aims to be a space of encounter for anyone with an interest in reaching out, engaging with, orientating within, and contributing to the dialogue surrounding research through the arts and sciences.

Since 2016, ARIAS has been working in between its five founding institutions for academic and higher education: University of Amsterdam (UvA), VU Amsterdam (VU), Gerrit Rietveld Academie (GRA) / Sandberg Instituut (SI), Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA) and Amsterdam University of the Arts (AHK).

Forming inspiring alliances, ARIAS connects to the wider field of scientific and artistic research in Amsterdam, with Tolhuistuin, International Institute for Social History (IISG), Framer Framed, Zone2Source, Beeld en Geluid, EYE Filmmuseum, IAS, and others.

Working Groups

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ARIAS’ transdisciplinary working groups gather together practitioners to facilitate exchange and collaboration around specific themes.

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Through the groups, we aim to activate and expand a network of artists and researchers working in and between our associated partner institutions and the independent art field: University of Amsterdam (UvA), VU Amsterdam (VU), Gerrit Rietveld Academie (GRA)/Sandberg Instituut (SI), Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (AUAS), and Amsterdam University of the Arts (AHK).

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By organising get-togethers and fostering interaction in and outside the groups, we hold space and time for collaborations to develop into long-term research projects.

Open Events

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Our events are spaces for encounters and network building between artistic and scientific networks, inside and outside of Amsterdam.

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We invite artists and researchers to share and contextualize their practice within a wider network.

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We aspire to keep the discourse on artistic research accessible by ensuring that ARIAS events are always open and welcoming.

Website and Newsletter

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Through our website, we offer resources for transdisciplinary research practices and a space for making them public and visible.

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Both the website and the newsletter work to gather and disseminate knowledge within the field of artistic research.

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We support and expand the artistic research network in Amsterdam and connect it to a wider national and international sphere.

Advice on PhD and Third Cycle of Education in the Arts

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We inform the network about developments in research funding through our website and newsletter.

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We consult post-Master researchers in giving shape to a doctoral trajectory in the arts.

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We point out grant trajectories relevant to research projects initiated by ARIAS partners and working groups.

Find out more about doctorate opportunities →

TEAM

Patricia de Vries

PROGRAMME MANAGER

Patricia de Vries leads the interdisciplinary research group Art and Spatial Praxis at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. This group explores how artistic and social practices can analyze, claim, and shape urban spaces, land, and territories. Drawing from feminist geography, Black studies, environmental humanities, and critical theory, the research examines the dynamics of power that determine who holds authority over spatial development and land use, as well as how to intervene in these dynamics. One of the group's initiatives, Plot(ting), serves as an open artistic research platform that investigates alternative forms of knowledge production, existence, and social relations through art and scholarship focused on space and spatial relationships. Previously, Patricia was an assistant professor of philosophy at Maastricht University.

She loves getting lost in books and hiking mountain trails. She also enjoys good food (preferably not cooked by her), practising martial arts, and (head—)dancing to soulful ‘70s music or ‘90s trash. And she much appreciates cat content, memes, and bad jokes.

Contact Patricia →

Nienke Scholts

PROGRAMME COORDINATOR

Nienke Scholts is ARIAS’ long-time inspired programme coordinator. Her artistic practice is dramaturgy, applied with attention, an eye for detail, and care for well-being. Her work has been unfolding throughout manifold collaborations; with various (inter)national performance artists; with Veem House for Performance - where she curated discursive programmes and developed her own publication series Words for the Future (2018); and in her long-term research project Pausing Together (working title).

Nienke’s research focuses on dramaturgies of collaborative work in the performing arts field in relation to the depletion of physical and mental resources. Asking how shared and relational responsibility can be taken for co-creating and practicing regenerative ways of working, together with performing arts collectives and organisations she is developing individual and collective ‘pausing practices’. Under the umbrella of this research she created the audio piece This Walk is a Pause (2022), was a resident at i.a. Saari Residency (2019), Tanzfabrik Berlin (2024), and a fellow of THIRD/DASresearch at the Amsterdam University of the Arts (2018-2022).

She loves to draw with water-colour, walk in enchanting landscapes, warm-up like a cat in the early spring sun, poetry being read to her, gathering friends around the table, connecting through humour, and ice-skating.

Contact Nienke →

Sofía Fernández Blanco

COMMUNICATIONS

Sofía is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher exploring the entanglements between different regimes of knowledge and power structures. Through a decolonial lens, she delves into past and present forms of exploitation and violence to unravel the material and immaterial mechanisms used to legitimise them. Engaging in historical, anthropological, ecological, and material research, she embarks on a peregrination of sorts that manifests in short films, mixed-media installations and essays, offering alternative cartographies through which to read these events differently. Some of her essays have been published in academic and artistic journals such as Kunstlicht and Simulacrum Magazine, among others.

Alongside her artistic and research practice, Sofía has worked in editing and communications for more than a decade across various organisations. At ARIAS, she brings both areas of expertise together to support the dissemination of artistic research.

Some of her favourite activities include reading, hiking, watching films and animal videos, visiting the dunes with her dog, and having nerdy conversations.

CONTACT