Oscar van ’t Riet creates work that sets something in motion. Sometimes it challenges, sometimes it confronts, but it always starts from the question of what art does to people. During the Fine Art and Design in Education programme at Academy of Art & Design Zwolle, he discovered that for him, it is not just about making, but also about what you can spark in others through your work. 'You don’t just learn how to work visually here, you also learn how to bring people into what you make or want to express.'
'I wanted to work with people, explain things or spark something in them. That combination of the social and the creative really suits me. In this programme, I’m also developing my own visual practice.'
For Oscar, choosing Fine Art and Design in Education felt like the right fit. 'From 2013 until 2023, I attended a youth theatre school, so that was basically my whole childhood. That’s where I got used to performing, creating and being on stage. When I had to choose a programme, I looked at directing and theatre education as well, but that didn’t feel right. I was looking for something with a bit more stability and realised I wanted more than just acting.'
'At first, I thought: you become an arts and crafts teacher and that’s it. But here I discovered it’s much broader than that. You could work as a museum educator, for example, or as an advisor within a municipality.'
During the programme, Oscar does several internships, allowing him to experience different sides of the professional field. 'My first internship was at a secondary school. You’re really standing in front of a classroom and working within a curriculum. You teach classes and work towards certain goals. You can’t completely do whatever you want, but within those frameworks you still make your own choices. What do you think students should learn, and how do you communicate that?'
'In my current internship at De Museumfabriek, I work in a completely different way. There, I develop educational activities for children visiting the museum. They walk past fossils or machines, and we talk, for example, about the history of Enschede as a textile city. Afterwards, they create something themselves. Right now, I’m working on an assignment where they recreate a bone using soapstone, so they’re really filing and sanding.'
'For me, it starts with observation. What are you actually seeing, and how is something constructed? I try to let them experience that step by step. They don’t know what ‘analytical observation’ means, but that is what they’re doing. Afterwards, they start making something themselves, so they also understand how materials work and what you can do with them. I really try to encourage that creative process children naturally have.'
'What I find interesting is that, on the one hand, you’re a teacher trying to communicate something, while on the other hand you’re also an artist. At first, I saw those as two separate things, but I don’t anymore. It’s about who you are and how you translate that into what you make and how you pass it on to others.'
'What I also notice is that there’s a lot of space to combine different sides of yourself. Things you initially think might not fit within the programme can actually become part of your work. For me, that meant recently performing in a theatre production again and allowing that experience to influence my visual process.'
What happens if you swipe based only on appearance for 50 days?
One of those visual works focuses on our tendency to keep swiping. It started with something that frustrated Oscar: 'I’ve always been socially critical. If something annoys me, I want to understand why.'
That became the starting point for his project about dating apps. 'I was sitting with friends and someone mentioned he was swiping every single day. I thought that was bizarre, because you’re judging people purely on their appearance. On top of that, you already know almost everything about someone. So what’s the value of that first meeting anymore? But I didn’t just want to say it was bad, I wanted to understand how it actually works and what it does to you. So I started doing it myself and turned it into an extensive research project.'
'I kept track in an Excel sheet of how many people I saw, who I liked, conversations that started and also what it was doing to me personally. I did that for fifty days. On average, I saw around 114 people a day and eventually ended up with more than 5,400 profiles. After a while, I noticed my perspective changing. I started seeing people almost as numbers and stopped really looking at them. That was quite confronting to realise about myself. At the same time, I understood: I’m just one of many too.'
He translated that insight into a performance. 'I sat there in front of an audience, swiping live using my own sort of ‘algorithm’: glance briefly, judge and move on. People immediately understood what was happening and the room became completely silent. Afterwards, someone even told me they were going to delete their dating app. For me, it was about making people experience how quickly you reduce someone to nothing more than an image.'
'In my opinion, this programme is really for people who want to make something that also means something. You need to be creative, but above all curious and a bit critical. Someone who wants to investigate things or has an opinion about something. If you’re interested in art, but also in people, and you want to combine those two, then this is the right place for you.'
'What makes this programme special is that you are trained both as an autonomous artist and as an art educator. That combination is what makes it strong. It’s different from a Fine Art programme, because you don’t just develop yourself as a maker, you also learn how to apply your own vision of arts education in practice.'
'And maybe most importantly: you’re being trained for a profession here and you really develop who you are as a person.'