Starting in the winter semester 2025/26, the Campus Gemstones and Jewellery in Idar-Oberstein will launch its first interdisciplinary lecture series: Studium Generale. It is part of all courses of Study at Campus but also open to members of the university as well as interested guests from outside the university.
Studium Generale invites participants to explore the many dimensions of desire, creativity, and action. After each lecture a Q&A will take place.
All lectures will be delivered in English.
Delight is often the catalyst for human action. It arises from an attraction to the Other—whether people, ideas, objects, materials, or processes—and sets in motion a sensuous engagement that momentarily dissolves the boundaries between subject and object. Unlike duty or external obligation, this impulse springs from encounters with that which feels different, complementary, and enriching to everyday existence.
Far from being an end in itself, such delight fosters presence, connection, and vitality. In reaching toward the Other, living relationships to the world emerge through touch, interaction, and transformation. The lecture series opens a space to rethink and experience the possibilities of acting and making with delight at their core.
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.
PhD-Candidate, Konstfack Stockholm, Sweden
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.
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
Participation fee:
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.
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