with May Abnet ✼ Margherita Autorino ✼ Filippo Berta ✼ Giorgia Chiarion ✼ Zoe Francia Lamattina ✼ Yoojin Lee ✼ Ida Malfatti ✼ Ido Nahari ✼ Andrea Pizzini ✼ Linsey Rendell ✼ Kata Szász-Komlós ✼ Cassandre Tornay ✼ Alexandra Valahu ✼ Beatrice Zerbato
Introduction: about the Academy of Margins
Robida is welcoming everyone to the 2026 edition of the Academy of Margins!
The Academy of Margins is a long-term project started by Robida in 2022: it is conceived as a learning platform that stimulates collaborative and discursive learning and is 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 transforms Topolò/Topolove (IT) into a learning site, where one can put in relation different knowledges brought to the village by researchers, professors, activists, artists who encounter the place and the landscape and are transformed by them. Contents are situated in the place, adapting to it, changing through it: the context ceases to be the scenery of learning, and becomes a participant to the development of reflections, questions and knowledge articulations.
The Academy of Margins intertwines practical workshops, such as learning how to repair dry stone walls, how to carve wood or how to code a website, with theoretical seminars, such as the seminars led by Michael Marder and Oxana Timofeeva, or reading groups.
Since its first year, the Academy of Margins hosts also a summer school. Each edition of the summer school has experimented with different pedagogical models, from traditional roles of teacher and student to co-created, horizontal formats. The Academy embraces learning in between moments: while braiding hair, napping under trees, swimming, or cooking together. By fostering entangled relations between people, place, and theory, it explores how ecology, art, and thought can become indistinguishable from life itself.
Joining the Academy of Margins’ summer school means joining the present research, questions, doubts and experiments of the collective, while also join Robida in its everyday life!
The program of the Summer School of Academy of Margins 2026 will revolve around one of Robida’s most feared and intriguing topics, both theoretically and practically: ruins.
The context: Zetova hiša
In 2025, we bought a ruin. As every house in Topolò, it is called by its family name, Zetova hiša. We also often call it by the surname of its last inhabitant, Gubana. We bought it to save it from other buyers who could have potentially disastrous plans for it, but also because Zetova hiša has always been a place for our dreams and for small practical actions. Years ago, we squatted its yard, cutting the overgrown vegetation and transforming it into a humble and messy vegetable garden. Then we planted some fruit trees. We tried to transform one of its cellars into a chicken coop, but the operation quickly failed, and all the chickens were eaten by a fox who found a hole through which to enter the room. This year, we installed three beehives in the upper part of the garden.
We mainly spend time around the house: planting, sowing, cutting stubborn robida (bramble) branches that return every month, fixing the compost, harvesting plants we planted and foraging wild ones. We gather in the space adjacent to the house, since the building itself is currently too dangerous to be used or entered.
In 2019, Janja included Zetova hiša in her architectural master’s thesis about Topolò, where she proposed transforming it into a common living room for the community. In 2021, we organised a small symposium on artist residencies and the house became a centre for reflections around dwelling and shared spaces. We reimagined its function as that of a toolbox or a pocket knife: a flexible space capable of holding different possibilities. We continued thinking about it as a future common space where we could store books and watch films in winter, as a studio, a place for residencies, or a workshop.
But beyond the specific ruin we bought, we are interested in this topic because the whole village of Topolò/Topolove and the landscape surrounding it can be considered as a not-yet-ruin. Many buildings have been abandoned for decades and are on the verge of collapse. The thriving forest has overgrown terraced fields that were once cultivated: traversing the woods, one can discover the archaeology of rural Topolò, with dry stone walls drawing horizontal lines in the landscape, today covered by trees and ivy. The local culture, both material and immaterial – such as the Slovene dialect, old toponyms, songs and rituals – is also a ruin, slowly being forgotten, with small pieces disappearing every time an elder member of the community dies.
We know the fragility of ruins and the pain that hovers around them. We do not romanticise them by looking at them from afar, but stay close to them. We find them beautiful and try to learn from their teachings.
The topic: Tending Ruins
During the Summer School, we will dwell together with words that circulate around the notion of ruin, such as erosion, weathering, decay, decomposition, disintegration, dissolution, collapse, surrender and allowance. But also with words that refuse to let ruination become the only story: repair, desire, dream, reactivation and resistance.
We call tending the practice of moving between these words. Tending means remaining close to what is exposed to ruination, decay, interruption and change, without turning away from loss, but also without allowing loss to become the only horizon. It is a way of staying with instability while nurturing what persists, what resists, what dreams, and what continues to compose worlds despite their fragility.
The Summer School on Tending Ruins will offer time and space to explore these questions through workshops, walks, listening sessions, readings, field experiments and shared meals. The research will unfold through three interconnected perspectives: Ecological Ruins, Built Ruins and Cultural Ruins.
Thematic sites
1. Ecological ruins
What lessons of abandonment and abundance do meadowed ruins teach us?
In the middle of the thick forest, we encounter the ruins of past landscapes. They appear as revelations – sudden openings of light in the dark forest we traverse: clearings, traces of former meadows. They are still covered by grass or inhabited by old fruit trees. The writer Maria Sledmere, reflecting on meadows in her book Midsummer Song (2024), writes that “to meadow is to go into mourning and dream”. Perhaps going into mourning and dreaming is also what all ruins ask of us: not to overlook why they appeared, to understand their genealogy, to grieve and honour their previous lives, but at the same time not to focus only on what Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang describe as the “teleological trajectory of pain, brokenness, repair” in their text R-Words: Resisting Research (2014). Instead, ruins ask us to dedicate space to desire and dream.
In these minute ecologies – in a sudden patch of grass in the forest, beside a last fruit tree resisting among brambles, in a stubbornly cut meadow, near the trace of an old garden or a once-cultivated vine growing widely on the ground – we encounter ruins as tense places between abandonment and abundance.
This perspective opens possibilities for practical engagement with spontaneous vegetation growing in meadowed ruins, botanical explorations, writing exercises, listening, smelling and tasting experiments, as well as reflections on ecological loss and reparative practices from elsewhere.
2. Built ruins
Are built ruins the material traces of a way of life that has been displaced from existence? Could ruins be interpreted as wordless archives, telling stories of gestures, building techniques and modes of being that have formed a place?
In recent decades, the number of human inhabitants in Topolò has steadily dwindled, giving rise to a profusion of ruins. Yet this process has also been accompanied by the gradual repopulation of these spaces by non-human beings. Who are the new dwellers of old stone houses, half-collapsed dry stone walls and kozolci (hayracks) around and beyond the village? And what can we learn from the symbiotic relations between the new and the old?
From ancient practices of spoliation, where parts of old buildings were reappropriated because of their symbolic value, to contemporary forms of inhabiting abandoned spaces, ruins challenge us to consider what to preserve and what to let go of. Are there ways of living with ruins that embrace deterioration, incompleteness and fragility? How can we activate a ruin without erasing its layers and contradictions?
This perspective focuses on building and unbuilding, practices of restoration, material cultures, exercises in deliberate incompleteness and reflections on vernacular construction techniques and the knowledge systems embedded within them. It connects the reality of Topolò with other situated cases, critically examining the fate of ruins elsewhere and speculating about the permanence and transformation of obsolete forms of dwelling.
3. Cultural ruins
What happens when worlds disappear – and how do we resist their disappearance?
The ruination explored during this Summer School is not only material, but also cultural, linguistic and political. Dialects fade, rituals dissolve, and collective life-worlds are transformed by (forced) emigration, borders and their violent reconfigurations, wars, ethnic cleansings and genocides, standardisation, extraction and other demands of the “storm” called progress – a force that propels us into the future, while the debris before us grows skyward, as Walter Benjamin described.
Yet cultural ruination is not only a story of loss. It is also a messy field of resistance, reactivation and stubborn continuity with what remains. We are interested in practices and theories that stay with the cultural remnants of this storm: broken continuities, partial survivals, deliberate refusals and forms of knowledge that persist outside dominant narratives of development and innovation.
This perspective engages with disappearing languages and dialects, rituals and storytelling as world-forming methodologies, and the fragments and remains of local cultural systems. It also explores historical and contemporary practices that resist cultural erasure and insist on the possibility of continuing otherwise.
Modalities: Learning-With
In the second edition of the Summer School of the Academy of Margins, we decided to try to develop and put into action the concept of learning-with, the concept first proposed to us by our friend and colleague Michael Marder.
This with has multiple interpretations. Firstly, it is the antonym of the proposition without, which is so characteristic of the standard pedagogical process. The sterile classroom is only one of its withouts: it puts the one who learns out of the context of everyday life, in which — so it seems — learning does not and cannot take place. As if learning is one of the multiple modes of our being in which a human subject can put itself into, modes which are strictly separated from one another. But learning-with “is not a predominantly mental function, but a ‘movement’ of life, involving the human subject as a whole and in relation to the various environments that constitute the ecological world,” wrote authors Carvalho, Steil and Gonzaga in their article Learning from a more-than-human perspective. Plants as Teachers (2020).
But the with also opposes the proposition from, as in learning-from, the method which clearly assumes that there is an essential opposition between the student and the teacher, the opposition which perpetuates the power relations imposed on subjects by the standard pedagogical process. Learning-with, on the other hand, means — as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney write in their The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013) — to be “committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. […] The point of calling it ‘study’ is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present.” There is no call to order in learning-with, no interpellation into teachers and students, activity and passivity, spaces of study and spaces of mere being.
At the fourth edition of Robida’s Summer School, we continue to propose making the participants into students and teachers at the same time. But learning-with is not only a simple gesture of dismantling this binary opposition, but a context, that provides a way of forming a new possible subjectivity, which is open to contaminations from outside — other participants, the environment, the landscape and its human and non-human inhabitants; it is a context, as famously wrote Moten and Harney, “where people sort of take turns doing things for each other or for the others, and where you allow yourself to be possessed by others as they do something.” Being possessed by others, their otherness and particular personalities, everyday practices, eating habits, choice of words, ticks, even — this is what we call learning-with.
Partner / Partnerji / Partners
Master II Livello in Environmental Humanities, Università Roma 3, Roma
Istituto per l’istruzione slovena / Zavod za slovensko izbraževanje, San Pietro al Natisone
Almanac APS, Torino
Obliquo APS, Pordenone
Associazione Topolò-Topoluove, Topolò (Grimacco)
Inštitut za slovensko kulturo / Istituto per la cultura slovena APS, San Pietro al Natisone
BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht (NL)
In collaborazione con / V sodelovanju z / In collaboration with
Associazione/Društvo Topolò-Topoluove per l'utilizzo della Juljova hiša
Topolò, i suoi abitanti e i suoi boschi.
La summer school dell'Accademia dei margini è un progetto di Robida supportato da Regione Friuli Venezia Giulia e Ufficio per gli sloveni nel mondo e oltreconfine del governo sloveno.
Poletna šola Akademije margin je del projekta Akademija margin za leto 2026, ki nastaja ob finančni podpori Dežele Furlanije - Julijske krajine in Urada Vlade republike Slovenije za Slovence v zamejstvu in po svetu.
The Academy of Margins program is funded by the Region of Friuli Venezia Giulia and the Office of the Government Office for Slovenians Abroad.
