Delightful Doing is an interdisciplinary public lecture series organised by the Campus Gemstones & Jewellery in Idar-Oberstein and presented within the framework of the Idar-Obersteiner FormDiskurs.
Taking place each winter semester, it is dedicated to a changing theme that connects artistic practice with broader cultural, social and intellectual questions.
Invited artists, researchers and thinkers contribute their own perspectives and experiences. Open to students, members of the university and the wider public, Delightful Doing creates a space for exchange and discussion.
Artistic Practice: Ways of Questioning the World
What does it mean to conduct research through artistic practice? What kind of knowledge can emerge from it? The openness of the artistic process – the unpredictability of its course and outcome, as well as of its effect on those who encounter the work – holds a particular potential for insight.
Further perspectives emerge when different disciplines and forms of knowledge come together. What happens when their methods meet? What new questions can arise from these encounters?
Delightful Doing 2 approaches these considerations from different points of view. The four lectures follow neither a fixed definition nor a shared understanding of the field. Instead, they offer possible responses to an open question: What can be discovered through these different paths – and how might they change our understanding of what research can be?
Before the Work Begins
Jürgen Krause’s works emerge from simple actions that often require careful and precise preparation. He primes paper, draws lines by hand or sharpens tools – activities that may appear straightforward, but depend on techniques that are tested, practised and gradually mastered. This preparation provides him with the knowledge and experience needed to begin, yet it does not prescribe what follows.
It is precisely this relationship between preparation and uncertainty that is central to his work. Knowledge and experience provide a starting point, but do not determine the outcome. Through the continuity of making, the relationship between process and result, preparation and completion begins to shift. Something can emerge that can neither be fully planned nor anticipated. Krause’s practice raises a central question of artistic research: How much knowledge does it take to enter the unknown – and what kind of knowledge only emerges along the way?
Jürgen Krause is a German artist based in Frankfurt am Main whose work encompasses drawing, objects and installation. He describes a central aspect of his practice as one in which preparation and execution coincide, characterised by reduction and close attention to everyday actions and materials. He studied at the Kunsthochschule Mainz and the Städelschule Frankfurt. His work has been exhibited at institutions including Museum Wiesbaden, Kupferstich-Kabinett Dresden, Kunstmuseum Bonn and Bundeskunsthalle Bonn.
The Productive Unknown
What happens when archaeologists and artists address the same questions from different directions? Their collaborative work in experimental archaeology creates a space in which historical knowledge meets making, material experience and open-ended exploration.
Archaeology begins with evidence from the past and seeks ways to interpret it, while artistic practice can introduce intuition, experimentation and outcomes that cannot be fully anticipated. Rather than simply combining two disciplines, the lecture examines what happens in the space between them: how methods may shift through exchange, where blind spots become visible, and whether new questions and forms of knowledge can emerge that neither discipline might have reached on its own.
Nikolas Papadimitriou is an archaeologist and Director of the Paul and Alexandra Canellopoulos Museum in Athens, specialising in Aegean archaeology and material culture. His long-standing collaboration with contemporary jewellery artist Akis Goumas brings together archaeology, historical research and jewellery practice. Jewellery artist Biljana Klekachkoska joined this exchange more recently, beginning with an internship at the Canellopoulos Museum and later contributing, together with Goumas, to research on Byzantine gold jewellery from the museum’s collection. An alumna
of the Gemstones & Jewellery Department in Idar- Oberstein, Klekachkoska has a particular expertise
in filigree, which she continues to explore within contemporary jewellery.
Rethinking Artistic Research
Artistic research, in Silvia Henke’s understanding, needs to be approached on its own terms rather than measured against the standards of scientific research. In the Manifesto of Artistic Research, which she co-authored, the aesthetic is understood as a distinct mode of thinking and knowing, grounded in artistic practice, experience and perception.
Building on this position, Henke explores what kinds of knowledge can emerge through artistic practice and how materiality and aesthetic experience shape this process. If artistic practice is understood as a way of thinking and producing knowledge in its own right, this also raises questions about what we recognise as research, how such knowledge can be articulated and shared, and which forms of understanding may escape established academic methods. Rather than seeking a fixed definition of artistic research, the lecture approaches the field through the aesthetic and considers what these different ways of knowing might contribute to education and society.
Silvia Henke is a cultural theorist, writer and Professor of Cultural Theory at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts – Design Film Art, where she is also Dean. Her research and publications explore artistic and aesthetic thinking, visual culture and art education, with a particular interest in how aesthetic experience shapes processes of learning, perception and knowledge.
From Practice to Research – and Back
How does artistic practice become research – and what happens to it when it enters the context of a PhD? Patrícia Domingues and Edu Tarín approach these questions from two different positions: one looking back on a completed doctorate, the other from within an ongoing one.
Their research follows distinct paths. Domingues’ PhD grew out of her work with stone, exploring fracture, landscape and the tension between material agency and artistic control. Tarín’s current doctoral research investigates the changing relationship between craft and technology, bringing traditional making into dialogue with machines and new forms of production. Both reflect on how such questions emerge from practice, how a doctorate can reshape the way an artist works, and what is gained – or challenged – when artistic practice enters an academic research context.
Patrícia Domingues and Edu Tarín are jewellery artists and researchers who both completed their Master’s degrees at the Gemstones and Jewellery Department in Idar-Oberstein. Domingues works primarily with stone and geological materials, exploring material transformation and the boundaries between natural and artificial. She completed her PhD at PXL-MAD School of Arts in Hasselt and is currently a lecturer at the Royal College of Art in London. Tarín’s practice centres on gemstones and lapidary techniques. He is currently pursuing his PhD at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, where he also teaches.
STUDIUM GENERALE
The Studium Generale lecture series is presented within the framework of Idar-Obersteiner FormDiskurs, a cultural programme dedicated to fostering dialogue between academia, the arts, and the wider public. Organized and hosted by the Campus Gemstones and Jewellery of Trier University of Applied Sciences, the programme provides a platform where scholarly perspectives, artistic practices, and societal issues intersect in meaningful exchange.
Venue: Campus Gemstones and Jewellery,
Saarstrasse 2, 55743 Idar-Oberstein
Timing: Wednesday or Friday at 6:30 pm
Admission is free
Concept and management: Julia Wild M.A.- wild@hochschule-trier.de
Studium Generale is made possible through the generous support of the City of Idar-Oberstein and the County of Birkenfeld, and realised in close cooperation with the Jakob Bengel Foundation, FormDiskurs underscores the region’s strong commitment to education, culture, and heritage. Together, these partnerships enable a vibrant and enduring forum that enriches both the university community and the cultural life of the region.
Pleasure and Freedom. Aspects of Epicurean Art of Living
The lecture explores the tension between pleasure and freedom in Epicurean philosophy. Though both are commonly regarded as desirable goods, their unchecked pursuit often undermines human flourishing. Excessive desire leads not to fulfilment but to dependence; unbounded freedom negates itself. At the heart of Epicurus’ ethics lies a concept of happiness grounded in physical well-being, mental tranquillity (ataraxia), and rational self-regulation. Freedom is thus redefined as autonomy through conscious self-limitation. Epicurus’ calculus of pleasures helps distinguish between natural and empty desires. The talk further highlights the social and ethical dimensions of Epicureanism – especially friendship, justice, and mutual care. In the end, it is not the pursuit of pleasure but the mastery of desire and lust that grants true freedom – and with it, a well-lived and genuinely pleasant life.
A Pleasure Cruise
Cruising in its many forms is driven by pleasure, it is a state of action or motion, but where am I/you/we/them going? As a state of motion, words, terms and definitions shift just as quickly as the view out of the window on whatever mode of transport now boarded. This lecture will unpack and entangle actions of cruising from curatorial strategy, research method, and craft based studio practices, to body modification as alchemy, golf courses becoming public sex forests, and a strategy for navigating the Louvre Museum.
Embracing Resistance
Embracing resistance is essential; simply going with the flow is not an option. Resistance shapes muscles, sharpens the mind and allows unexpected solutions to mature. On Thursday, 30 October, Christoph Zellweger will talk about his artistic perspectives and what he sees as the necessity of facing resistance – always in context of creative processes – and beyond.
The Swiss jewellery artist will report on 35 years of interdisciplinary, critical and experimental practice. He will present his latest work, which was recently shown in the context of a pharmacy museum in Lisbon, as well as earlier works and installations, and elaborate on how he explores the factual, fictional, socio-political and ethical dimensions of his themes. As an artist, designer and researcher, Christoph experiences ‘making’ as a playful and intuitive form of thinking aloud. For him, it is essential and a true privilege to defy reality time and time again, thereby gaining insight into both dystopian and desirable alternatives.
Open Endings: The Art of Not-Knowing What You‘re Looking For.
What happens when designers stop knowing what they‘re looking for? When there‘s no brief? When experiments lead in directions nobody planned? This lecture explores the joy of open-ended experimentation – that special moment when curiosity becomes more important than control. Yet open-ended research doesn‘t mean being planless. Through projects from design research, it becomes visible how rigorous documentation and curated analysis make the unpredictable productive: AI systems that become stubborn collaborators, biological materials that develop their own logic, or the simple drawing that changes direction while emerging.
Between the “already-known,“ the “known-not-known,“ and the completely “unknown,“ new forms of knowledge emerge. A counter-proposal to classical research concepts that understands serendipity as a cultivatable method.
In search of resonance in a precarious world - On material relational quality and the struggle for concrete experience in times of transformation.
Things influence relationships: They break, they are easy to throw away, some seems to be alive and we keep our distance from others. Their materiality shapes how we relate to them, what we can do with them and what they do to us. Their nature determines how we can experience ourselves and the world. To question this material relational quality becomes even more precious in the face of ecological crisis and digitalization, because both transformations are threating the possibility of enabling, liveable and valuable relations with and within the material world.
The presentation shows that seeking resonant relationships with the material world entails a direct exposure to its concrete experience—and, often, to alienation rather than resonance. By various examples it will be illustrated how things shape the possibilities of relating to the world, and how such conditioned relations can be approached reflexively. It will be demonstrated that an inhibiting relational quality contributes to the precarization of concrete experience, and that resonance in a transforming material world is frequently characterized by the experience of ambivalence.
Objects of Desire and Embodied Pleasures. Rethinking the Fetish After Modernity.
In modern cultural theory, the concept of the fetish has gained an unfavorable reputation. Prominently discussed by Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx, who both declared it an indication of misrecognition for different reasons, it models excessive pleasure which not only aesthetic theory in the idealistic tradition of Immanuel Kant was eager to dismiss. As a critical lens, however, fetishism proved crucial to Laura Mulvey’s famous analysis of scopic regimes in androcentric cultures and concomitant visual pleasures. Set against the backdrop of a cultural history in colonial expansion and appropriation, this lecture explores artistic articulations of the fetish that address its sensational economies through material vocabularies of the erotic. The case studies propose an understanding of pleasure that is inextricably linked to the socially situated body as both its fundamental condition and determining instance.
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