Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, offers master programmes in fields of art and design. Each year a new Temporary Programme is launched to align art-education with the dynamics of contemporary society. These are full-time, two-year programmes leading to an MA degree in Fine Art and Design. Temporary Programmes run in parallel to the five “Main Departments” of Sandberg Instituut but have a single cohort and are topical; researching particular societal questions in order to generate new perspectives and make way for new positions for artists, designers, theorists, organizers and more.
Compared to the main departments, Temporary Programmes can be considered a “research master.” The heads of the programmes are expected to have been researching and working on their topic for a substantial period of time before the start of the master. In this way the programme can be seen as a group continuation of this research within an educational environment for two years.
For this Open Call Sandberg Instituut is collaborating with If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution. Established in 2005, If I Can’t Dance is an arts organisation dedicated to exploring the evolution and typology of performance and performativity in contemporary art. This is done through the development, production, and presentation of commissioned projects with artists, curators, and researchers on the basis of long-term collaboration and support. (ificantdance.org)
The working title for the Temporary Programme 2026-2028 is Performance as Methodology: Body as Memory drawing on the current research (field of inquiry) and activities of If I Can’t Dance and Sandberg Instituut’s interest in expanding on the discourse around performance in relation to or as part of art and design education.
Open call for Programme Head: Performance as Methodology: Body as Memory (working title)
We are looking for a ‘head’ of the MA programme Performance as Methodology: Body as Memory. This figure will closely work with the team of If I Can’t Dance and Sandberg Instituut to develop, shape and run the MA programme. They will be a co-conspirator interested in the rich terrain of performance as a research methodology; busy with questions of embodied memory. The position of “head of programme” is for 2 days a week for a period of circa two years. There will be a budget for a small number of part-time tutors and guests, as well as administrative support.
We are looking for someone who:
– Is well-versed in performance genealogies and methodologies.
– Can demonstrate existing work, or interest in working with, the notion of the ‘body as memory’.
– Is embedded in the field of visual arts while demonstrating an understanding of the broader field of performances.
– Is committed to -and has knowledge of- feminist, gender, and queer studies, indigenous ecologies, decolonial thinking, critical race theories, and disability justices.
– Has experience in teaching and education.
– Is capable of setting up a clear educational framework and trajectory for the two-year MA programme.
– Understands that the students need inclusive care and support structures and that all students should be able to fully participate in all aspects of the programme.
– Is aware that different access needs will coexist in the programme and is eager to listen to them and learn from them, coming up with creative ways through which this plurality of positions can flourish.
– Enjoys and is used to working in a collaborative setting.
– Is excited about working together with the If I Can’t Dance and the Sandberg Instituut teams.· Applicants must reside in the Netherlands or be willing to relocate for the duration of the assignment. They should have an established freelance practice and be registered with the Dutch Chamber of Commerce (KVK).
– Non-EU applicants must hold a valid residence and work permit for the Netherlands.
– Is interested and equipped to develop and deliver a curriculum that aligns with and draws on the following three areas:
1 – Performance as Methodology
This MA programme is rooted in If I Can’t Dance’s long-standing engagement with performance, not as a defined artistic discipline, but as a distributed and embodied repertoire of practices that extends far beyond an art form, the visibility of the ‘live act’, and the ‘final product’. As such, it is seen as an expansive field of study and a methodology for making sense of the world. From this perspective, performance is not exclusively defined by the event. Instead, it consists of ongoing actions that often occur unannounced and unnoticed—in small gestures, behind screens, in the domestic realm, in collective movements, in mundane interactions, in transmissions and transactions, and in the disjuncture between inherited patterns and individual creation. In this understanding of performance, the stage is not a fixed location, but a porous, relational environment with various scales and manifestations: from the body to the home, from the street to the courtroom, from printed matter to digital spaces. This expanded definition of performance opens up a terrain of agency and play across a variety of practices, both artistic and non-artistic. As an attitude and methodology, performance can influence how we move, construct, deconstruct, read, and intervene in social and political structures, daily life, routines, embodied transmission, and archives.
2 – Body as Memory
‘Performance as Methodology’ aims to center (research and artistic) methodologies that tap into the ‘body as memory’ to intervene into Western epistemologies and modes of knowledge production that continue to operate through the assumption that being at a distance is a condition for knowing. The idea of a disembodied, decontextualized and neutral knowing subject has alienated us from the world, from ourselves and from each other, leading to the denial, erasure, and amnesia of other ways of being, sensing and making meaning of lived experience and the world around us. Performance brings back the questions of embodiment, relationality, affect, reciprocity and interdependence between subject and object, making this binary incomplete and inadequate. Performance in theory and practice is rich in research methods when it comes to situating knowledge in the body, lived experience and in being in-relation. In this regard, performance is inherently undisciplined and inter-disciplinary, and continues to learn from the teachings of feminist, gender, and queer studies, indigenous ecologies and cosmologies, decolonial thinking, critical race theories, and disability justice. In these perspectives, embodied knowledge exists and is transferred between bodies, both human and non-human, from the past, present and future. We are interested in sharing and experimenting with these methods of tapping into body as memory with students, including notions of repertoire, acts of transfer, scoring, rehearsing, storytelling, modes of attention, technologies of perception, and corporal literacy, in order to re-member, re-learn and re-value other worldviews, epistemologies, and stories that can teach us how to reinhabit and reperform the world.
3 – Performance as a mode of instituting
After two decades of working with artists, researchers, curators, and institutions in the field of performance and performativity, If I Can’t Dance is now in the process of rethinking its way of instituting, using performance as a strategy, method and set of tools to deconstruct, denaturalize and re-imagine forms, formats, and formalities that constitute an art institution: governance models, economic structures, hierarchies, roles and reproductive labour. Using If I Can’t Dance as the context in which this programme is situated, we are interested in setting up a learning framework in which we can expand on questions like:
– What tools can performance provide to decode, recode, and re-inhabit institutions, infrastructures, governance models, administrative and bureaucratic languages, educational apparatuses?
– How can we learn to learn with and through the body?
– How can we attune ourselves to different modes of perception of the world beyond ableist, normative and imperialist paradigms?
In such a wounded and violent present, our aim is to equip students with the tools to decode, disrupt, and transform the systems around them. By introducing performance methodologies to the students in the development of their research and art practices, the programme aims to invite students to reimagine new ways of engaging with knowledge, histories, bodies, and the world. We believe the collective, pedagogical, research-driven context of a MA programme is the perfect context for this.
Please send your letter of motivation (max. 2 A4) together with your CV to TP@sandberg.nl before 1 June 2025. In your motivation, please articulate how your approach to the role of head of programme would relate to the fields of inquiry from a pedagogical perspective based on your current (research) practice and previous experience.
A shortlist will be selected from the submitted motivations and candidates will be invited for an interview in early July 2025.