About the Academy
The Academy of Margins is a learning platform that stimulates collaborative and discursive learning, based on intimacy and rootedness where the margins are not only the site but also the widely intended content of the Academy itself.
The Academy of Margins was born from the intimate necessity, felt by Robida and her collaborators, to continue a learning path that we believe to have been too monolithic and mono-directional: the Academy of Margins allows the participants to wander and wonder, to learn through first-person encounter and to find those fertile points of contact between marginality and contemporary art and culture.
The Academy is inspired by contemporary projects such as Floating University (Berlin) or Inland Academy (Madrid) but also by key educational models of the 20th century such as Black Mountain College.
The main objective of the project is to invite relevant contemporary thinkers to a place usually excluded from their maps/travels/conferences and to stimulate the relationship with a younger generation of artists, curators, thinkers and public. The Academy of Margins stimulates the encounter between central theories and marginal places and the relationship between relevant authors and a younger generation that usually reads them and is developing itself through their ideas.
Programme
The Academy of Margins 2022 hosted 10 events / lectures: 10 young curators invited a thinker they admire to Topolò and moderated a public meeting with the guest.
The young curator and the author stayed in Topolò for a few days as guests of Robida. In this way, they had the opportunity to get to know each other, imagine the public meeting together and get in touch with the place and its marginality.
The events happened in Izba and were also streamed live through Radio Robida.
1. Bianca Elzenbaumer with Jack Bardwell
For our first event Jack Bardwell and Vida Rucli conversed with Bianca Elzenbaumer, designer, researcher, soul of projects as Brave New Alps, La Foresta - Accademia di comunità, Laboratory for Alpine Community Economies and co-presidenti of CIPRA International.
We talked about care, education, commons, feminism, living our of the city, London vs the Alps, feeling with the gut.
2. Female Genealogy, Restorative Garden - Rosario Talevi, Mercedes Talevi and Lucia Schiappapietra
"From june 10-13th my sister and I return to Topolò, this time with our mother. We join Robida with our own history: as a landscape designer/gardener, an architect/curator and a graphic designer/photographer. Throughout four days we will be exploring healing herbs and plants in the village and around: what is already there, what might be possible to grow and imagine how a space for a medicinal and restorative garden to spend time in could look like in Topolò.”
Rosario Talevi
3. Sylva/Isolario - Sara Marini
Il ritorno della selva segna la riemersione di un nuovo senso dell’“arcaico”, di una ennesima commistione tra l’architettura e la terra, un connubio consapevole del conflitto tra ragione e perturbante, tra avventura e comfort, tra memorie di città e modalità di vita proprie del bosco. Il termine “selva” connota precise e concrete realtà e molteplici immaginari ma indica anche la possibile traiettoria del tempo futuro quanto il rivolgimento verso un passato lontanissimo: è una freccia la cui direzione stabilisce i connotati di un nuovo possibile contrat naturel.
Sara Marini ha presentato l'ultima parte del progetto PRIN Sylva, che è Isolario.
4. Vasi fragili, suoli dissestati - Gerhard Wolf with Petra Filagrana
Quattro considerazioni cronotopologiche: estetica, territorio, ecologia tra tempo geologico e tempo storico
Cap.1 - Le lucertole di Pompei
Cap. 2 - Frontiere mobili: mappare e immaginare
Cap. 3 - Paesaggio, racconto, petrolio. L'Italia vista dal cielo: la Liguria nell'ecopoetica di Italo Calvino
Cap. 4 - Storie dell'arte e mondi postumani
Gerhard Wolf è il direttore del Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz e professore a Mendrisio (CH) al Master in Storia dell’arte e dell’architettura dove insegna Storia dell’arte medievale e dove Petra Filagrana l’ha conosciuto 〰️ arriva a Topolò per riflettere assieme a Petra su estetica ed ecologia dai confini mobili a Italo Calvino!
5. What's in the Air? - Franek Korbański with Ola Korbańska
We would like to invite the community and the guests of Topolò to join us in taking carbon dioxide removals as a starting point of an investigation into the imaginations of a decarbonised future. We want to come together and ask the question—‘what’s in the air?’ In the one that we are breathing in right now as well as in the one that we will be breathing in a decade, two, in a century? We are very excited to seek the answers together in Topolò.
6. Marginal Materialities: The Stories of Placemaking - Adam Przywara with Pola Salicka and Marcin Liminowicz
The materiality of architecture is an expression of a concrete relationship between humans and their environment: human-nature metabolism. Acknowledging that relationship allows us to think of architectural spaces beyond the abstract dualities of nature and culture, human and non-human, agency and matter. This event will be dedicated to learning, discussing, and operationalizing the concept of materiality and material metabolism in architectural design and place-making practices. The opening lecture will introduce the concepts and showcase the research on the materiality of architecture in the broader geographical and historical context. The following discussion and excursion around Topolò will position that knowledge in the local context.
Special event: In the Spider’s Web - Lijuan Klassen
Who doesn’t know the experience of a fleeting thought, of the impossibility to grasp a feeling with language and concepts? As an analogy by Ludwig Wittgenstein, in Philosophical Investigations, puts it fittingly: „We feel as if we had to repair a torn spider’s web with our own fingers“. Figures of thought, like the spider’s web, shape how we think thought, tell stories and approach the world — they are crucial vehicles for how we are in the world. Seeking for meaningful responses to the repercussions of climate change, racist capitalist regimes, the main objective of philosophy can no longer be truth but change. Thus, we must challenge the metaphors we are so used to employ.
7. Mystical Ecologies - Michael Marder with Aljaž Škrlep
In a two day intensive mini-seminar, that Robida held in Topolove between 16th and 17th of August, Michael Marder extended his line of research concerned with 'mystical ecologies' from the medieval Christian to the medieval Judaic tradition. In particular, we discussed the way the Book of Zohar, the body of kabbalistic thought that emerged in Southern France and Southern Spain between 1100 and 1300, conceives the four classical elements: water, fire, air, and earth. Reconstructing the ecological vision that subtends this largely forgotten body of writings, we came across a notion of divinity indistinguishable from questions of dwelling and exile, livability and sustainability, desire and sexual difference, distributed across the visible and the invisible cosmos.
In the public talk we dealt with Marder's work from plant-thinking, to his dump philosophy, and upper mentioned mystical ecologies.
For more information on the seminar click here.
8. Estado límbico - FAHR 021.3 architects with Antônio Frederico Lasalvia
This small residency rehearses the appropriation of marginal places through the symbolic reconstitution of physical space. By a series of photographs, where outsiders ensenate an imagined daily life on abandoned structures found in the landscape, a strange sense of familiarity sets in. These projected memories don't intend to speculate over an irretrievably lost past, but question the meaning of condemned futures.
The intervention sustains a limbic state between reality and fiction, where shared universalities such as family life and rural dwelling are dismantled by the hybrid facets of the contemporary world. No aquantiship is preserved and all usual grasp is displaced. In their place, one is left with the dissonant layers of a heterotopic imaginary.
9. Ruben Pater with Vida Rucli
A conversation with Ruben Pater, graphic designer, activist and educator from Amsterdam as our 9th Academy of Margins event! Pater is the author of the book “CAPS LOCK — How capitalism took hold of graphic design and how to escape from it”, published in 2021 by Valiz.
10. Nutrients - Margaux Schwab with Céline Mathieu
Margaux Schwab, founder of foodculture days, and artist and writer Céline Mathieu will spend a week in Topolò, thinking of the flow of ingredients. They will share a daily writing practice during their stay, considering both food and words as nourishment. . What do we take in, and what does it result in? In conversation and through writing, we reconsider what our cyclic replenishing in food as in words could mean, considering notions of perishability, restoration and mutuality.
The project Academy of Margins is supported by Regione Friuli Venezia Giulia.
