Summer School of the Academy of Margins 2026

Sitting at the intersection of ecological, built, and cultural ruins, this project proposes a collective, multi-day "walkshop" that explores the materials, methods, and performative dimensions of weave-walking. By treating slow, tactile labour as both a data-gathering tool and a means of alternative spatial documentation, the activity investigates how we might capture, record, and display overlooked landscape narrative traces.
This project builds directly on a research methodology conceived in the context of the Calabrian villages of Riace and Camini (at the other geographic extreme of Italy) and a walkshop co-run in London. The latter utilised portable, low-tech cardboard looms; in that context, walking served as an embodied mode of gathering local stories, registering site-specific atmospheres, and documenting the detritus found in shifting environments.
For the summer school, this collective experience will be adapted to push the critical and creative potential of the weave-walk methodology further. The walkshop is conceived as an open, collaborative framework to be shaped together on-site. Using portable cardboard looms alongside an Ashford sample loom, participants will collectively map Topolove’s unique environment, gathering physical fragments to weave its tangible remains into a shared material archive.

Marshall Berman concluded his seminal book on the shortcomings and promises of living with one another with a vision. He dedicated its last few lines to the burning desire to go on “fighting to make ourselves at home in this world, even as the homes we have made” go on “melting into air”. Berman was right. Homes and streets do melt into air. Photographs and videos emerging from Gaza, Kyiv and Al Fashir have all documented what Berman had described with disturbing precision. Facing such vast destruction, the manner in which to narrate the home is still undefined. Memorialise? Reconstruct? Modernise? How can research hope to demonstrate the democratic desire not just to idly exist within the world, but take part in its collective creation? Take part in that just fight to make ourselves at home in this world?
Films, articles and memories will be shared throughout our time within the Academy of Margins to come into grips with ruins and their strange essence. Each session will act as a collective conversation and revolve around different sorts of ruins: architectural, physical and cultural. Dealing with their historical innuendos as well as their questionable but undoubtable artistic merit, our time will be spent asking what are the ethical and social questions that should be asked when little remains.

A reading group dedicated to the Lebanese artist and poet Etel Adnan (1925–2021), exploring the notion of ruins and its connections to time, language, landscape and memory.
Etel Adnan’s work is deeply permeated by a sense of loss and a call for Utopia at the same time. As Huda Fakherredine writes, in Adnan’s poems “time becomes a place, a landscape for the journey” where ancient time, inner time, myth and the time of the dream collide with one another. Drawing from these ideas, we will collectively read “Baalbeck”, the closing poem of her collection Time (Nightboat 2019, translated by Sarah Riggs), alongside the essay “To write in a foreign language” first published in Issue No. 1 of the Electronic Poetry Review in 1996. Both the poem and the literary criticism/memoir piece explore Adnan’s nomadic identity and how being "caught between languages" led her to express herself through painting rather than writing.

As cultural workers, we navigate ruins on a daily basis—political, ecological, and ideological. Art institutions, as we know them, appear to us like maimed furniture, withered roots, or exhausted soil. Olive trees still stand, dotting the landscape, yet they fail to produce enough fruit for the press. Their roots have ceased to spread, and the mycorrhizal networks no longer facilitate mutual nourishment. The farmer is old and weary; the meager oil he produces feeds only his family. He spends money on pesticides and continues—just as he did when the trees were flourishing—to prune the suckers: those small shoots emerging from the base of the trunk, the final trace of a resistance persisting within the plant. We want to be those suckers.
In recent years, the concept of permaculture has gained traction within critical art theory as an operational model for creating cultural institutions that are better attuned to the urgent needs of the present—making them more ecologically sustainable and more ethical in their relationships with workers and diverse audiences. It is a proposal to regenerate institutions from within, much like permaculture regenerates exhausted soil in agriculture—and to do so with a long-term perspective.
The workshop Permacultural Cartographies: Regenerative micro-actions for institutional ruinations draws inspiration from the Permacultural Cartographies radio program. Through that project, Alessandra Faccini and I sought to apply the lens of permaculture to the context of Robida, envisioning it as a full-fledged cultural institution operating within the extended space of Topolò. By employing speculative tools, gaming tactics, and permaculture principles, we will step into the shoes of workers across Robida’s departments to tackle a range of scenarios—some real, others hypothetical.

Ricacci refers to the new shoots that emerge from the remains of a forest after disturbances such as logging, fire or other extreme weather events. Rather than restoring the previous condition, resprouting is a way for trees to adapt to a transformed environment, allowing life to continue through different forms of existence.
Drawing from this phenomenon, we will explore how small gestures can reveal and support latent ecologies within sites of disturbance. Using materials found in and around Topolò - discarded furniture, abandoned objects, timber, branches, stones and other remnants - we will assemble small site-specific supports such as stairs, bridges, seats, frames, paths, passages for animals or structures for climbing plants. The aim is to make visible forms of co-existence already taking place within the “ruins” and to explore how these environments are entangled with their surroundings.

Tremble! A lover is about to delve into the past is a freely adapted quote from Brouillon pour un dictionnaire des amantes by the materialist feminist lesbian writer Monique Wittig and the director Sande Zeig. This sentence, which begins with an imperative, captures our condition as researchers and our passionate and non-nostalgic relationship with the ruins, artifacts, and remnants of the past.
For the Summer School – Tending Ruins we are offering two activities. The first is a performative reading titled letture distese, an experiment in listening on the brink of sleep to excerpts from Monique Wittig’s poetic and political texts, cut up and recomposed in a nonlinear, expanded, fragmented, and polysemic manner.

At daybreak, we meet on the paths of Topolò — once cleared by hand, season after season, by the villagers — to continue a gesture of care.
One reads aloud from the collective reader. Others listen, hands in the cracks between the stones, pulling weeds from the paths.
Weeding and Reading is a shared rhythm of attention — to the landscape, to thought, to one another. A slow morning choreography of maintenance and meaning-making.

Ruins can also be understood as traces whose original context is no longer self-evident: a place, a symbol or a dialectal expression that has outlived the world that gave it meaning. These remnants reveal the territory as a palimpsest where narratives accumulate, resist each other and overlap.
This workshop proposes to approach Topolò through the traces embedded in its site. Beginning with a morning flânerie (walk) through the village and its surroundings, participants will forage for inscriptions, vernacular symbols, carved marks, improvised signage, and other overlooked fragments that reveal relationships between people, place, and memory. The collected material will be assembled into a shared lexicon where meaning emerges through the dialogue between the fragments; challenging a singular narrative of the territory.
The gathered signs will then be translated through hand-carved engravings onto small wooden tiles. Borrowing from the logic of quilting, the tiles will be assembled into a collective wooden tapestry. Each tile will retain its own specificity while contributing to a larger composition. The resulting patchwork proposes a dialectical reading of the territory—a semiotic tale—where fragments are held in tension, juxtaposed and unresolved. They reveal how an assemblage of foraged traces comes to generate new narratives of place.

Ruin Song explores listening to the latent sounds, story, or song of the ruins of Topoló by conducting a communal performance between stone and body(ies). This workshop asks us to hone the search-light of listening; experimenting with ways of cultivating a symbiotic and edifying process for the listener and the listened.
Sounding/Listening becomes a mode against forgetting, a way to amplify our relational resonance.
This workshop aligns itself in a lineage of cultural groups and people who “Sound the Stone”. Across millennia stones have been struck in ritual and musical contexts, here we imagine the ruins of Topoló not as a monument to a complicated past, but a Lithophone that is played by our attention, curiosity and willingness. We will collectively explore the sounding of the Ruin Lithophone, its possibilities and limitations. Participants are each given separate cards with a series of instructions (The Score) / Participants may adhere or not adhere (The Score) / Participants may trade their cards (The Score) / some instruments will be made available to further Sound/Play. After, we will discuss in a loose debrief what occurred, what was conjured and a moment to thank the ruins of Topoló

The global economy tiptoes. Rather counter-intuitively, architectural decay and land neglect happen to be instrumental to its balance... I would like to give a short lecture (tell a little horror story) about private property and spatial capitalism, followed by a writing workshop.
We will approach ruins through the concept of “enclosures”. Similarly to a ruin, an enclosure is both an object and a process. While we dwell in the village, admiring the craft of old stone walls (an architectural object), we will look at a selection of historical instances of territorial enclosures (a privatization process) from the industrial era to the digital present. Such top-down process of land restructuring have led to eviction and ruination.
Thinking through enclosures and ruins both allow us to visualize more vividly how land is predominantly valued in the world. How can we dismantle the monopoly of exchange-value over values such as use, culture, or emotion?

Gonae-ri 1159 is a plot of land on the Jeju coast, used and left more than once. An architect bought it for the thatched-roof house and the shoreline, meaning to fish there in old age. Then the government took part of the plot for a coastal road, the house was cleared, and the road came between the land and the water.
The island itself has been a destination for exiles, a fortress dug by forced labour, the site of a mass killing followed by half a century of enforced silence, and then a test-field for state policy. None of it was decided on the island, and each time a use ended, only ruin remained.
In 2018 his family returned to the plot and began (salt). Jeju has kept changing around it, as the island always has, while (salt) has taken its measure from the sea it faces and found its own way of working there. That way shows in the building, and in the tending, revised continually as the community expanded: three people, then a working team, then everyone who passed through.
(salt) is one case among ruins. The session offers eight years of photographs taken on site, on a phone, from construction to this morning—and asks what Topolò shares with it, what does not, and how others tend their own.

If tending is a practice of moving between words, then I see this as a method for troubling the space between ‘ruins’ and ‘repair’ by bringing Eve Sedgwick (reparative reading), Lauren Berlant (infrastructuring), and Anna Tsing (friction, ruins) into dialogue.
Sedgwick's reparative position holds the risks of relating with a refusal of the either/or and an ethics of care—as towards hope, pleasure, transformation. While Berlant approaches repair not as a means of resolution, but as a path amid struggle that stays with the frictions of collaborative life, and through ways of being that are 'inconvenient to the reproduction of power'.
While my research focuses on infrastructural landscapes (extractive zones, critical minerals, toxicity), I'm curious to speculate together on how these approaches to repair and ruins might apply (or not) in the intimate, situated scale of Topolò/Topolove. Through collective reading and writing exercises in the Robida meadows, we will attune to the scene and rehearse the 'sticky materiality of practical encounters' (Tsing). We will consider the affective underbelly of human and more-than-human relationality, and imagine how we might extend life from within lifeworlds—abundance in the ruins.

Altitude/Latitude Record will be a site-specific listening, and unruly, meditative writing project. We will find a hilly area in Topolò, and each choose a plant to sit with, alone, or in groups of two or three. Along a vertical (poleward) line, we’ll use a Pocket Scion and a contact mic to listen to the electrical activity of our chosen flora. Guided by a few prompts I will offer, each of us will write freely on what emerges from these plants, at a particular altitude, at a particular time. Together, we will create a sort of polyphonic time capsule—in this case, a collection of writing—of the plants living in Topolò’s geographic coordinates. As flora and fungi continue to migrate poleward and in altitude over decades, there will remain a written marker of the ecosystem composition at the exact time we all gathered, before the ruins whisper of what they had been.
Before our workshop, I will propose a short lecture about my research on poleward plant migration (from the Mediterranean basin to Western Switzerland, in this case), situated with stories about fungi and plants from the Vaud canton. I will share my learnings from interviews, conversations with local people, and writings about the cultural and geopolitical implications of cross-border, cross-ecosystem movement, as well as the displacement of local mythologies.

I regard meadows as ecological ruins, mutually connected to the geological, agricultural, and metabolic processes that generated and preserved them.
Songs, such as the linguistic minorities they express, are cultural ruins intertwined with the landscapes and traditions in which they were created and passed down.
In both cases, the relationship with the ruin is ethological rather than heritage-based; we are interested in the behavior of what is alive in meadows and songs.
The proposal is to share two moments tending a small clearing among the woods of Topolò:
Erborizzare:
botanical observation, collection of samples, and creation of a “fabula” herbarium in textile printing, arranged to compose a room in "representation" of the meadow.
Armonizzare:
(with Giulia Prete)
inside the herbarium set up in the clearing, exploring listening and polyphony, understanding traditional singing “modi”, and learning “Cheste viole palidute,” a female Friulian villotta.

Tremble! A lover is about to delve into the past is a freely adapted quote from Brouillon pour un dictionnaire des amantes by the materialist feminist lesbian writer Monique Wittig and the director Sande Zeig. This sentence, which begins with an imperative, captures our condition as researchers and our passionate and non-nostalgic relationship with the ruins, artifacts, and remnants of the past.
This second activity is a workshop on bodily practices from the choreographic research project archivia, an operation aimed at trasmitting and transforming performative practices and dance scores created by choreographer Monica Francia from the 1980s to the present. Through bodily practices and perceptual training, we will encounter the spectres of the past and produce the spectres of the future. We call “spectres” those angelic and monstrous figures existing outside linear time, that linger on around us and at any moment in our lives tell us to “go” or “enough”; therefore freezing us right where we are or, conversely, pushing us beyond our habits and out of the known path.