The Academy of Margins, a long term project started by Robida in 2022, 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 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.
It puts the centre and the margin in a dialectical co-becoming, while interpreting the space of the margin as a space of radical openness and creative productivity, which enables a minoritarian-becoming directed in several directions, a becoming that is so characteristic of the margins as “zones of unpredictability at the edges of discursive stability, where contradictory discourses overlap, or where discrepant kinds of meaning-making converge.” (Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, From the Margins, 1994)
The Academy is also a fruitful resource of imagination for Robida’s long-term project Village as House, which tries to respond to a universal process of people being disconnected from their lived environments, which is disabling social, cultural, economic, and political activities. Turn a village into a house, its paths into corridors, landscape into a space of continual negotiation. Extend the concept of the inhabitant to its non-human residents, animals and plants, who actively build the landscape in which we live together. The idea of the village being repopulated with human inhabitants must necessarily be accompanied by a non-anthropocentric understanding of the village as an interspecies living space. For this, in our opinion, the permanent convening of human and also non-human inhabitants of the village is necessary, because regular and careful intra-actions between different human and non-human actors are the beginning steps in establishing diverse affinities between them and creating a unified social space. One of Academy’s initiatives was establishing its own apiary, through the workshop The Village as Ecological Entity held in Topolò in May 2023.
PARTNERS
Biotehniška fakulteta, Oddelek za krajinsko arhitekturo (Uni LJ) ✼ diffrakt | zentrum für theoretische peripherie e.V. (Berlin) ✼ Dipartimento di Ingegneria Civile Edile e Ambientale (DICEA), Sapienza Università di Roma ✼ ISK Inštitut za slovensko Kulturo (Špietar, UD) ✼ Istituto Comprensivo Paolo Petricig / Večstopenjska šola Pavel Petričič (Špietar, UD) ✼ Fakulteta za arhitekturo (Uni LJ) ✼ Floating e.V. (Berlin) ✼ Fondazione Pietro Pittini ✼ Fondazione Pistoletto Cittadellarte (Biella) ✼ Foodculture Days (Vevey, CH) ✼ Ordine degli architetti della provincia di Udine ✼
The project Academy of Margins is supported by Regione Friuli Venezia Giulia.
