Practicing situatedness: Communities of attention, concentration, calibration, reflection
Ellen Røed, Rebecca Hilton, Stockholm University of the Arts, Sweden
Breakout Session 1: Wednesday 10 May 16:30 – 18:30

Map out a temporary constellation of relations and bring into being an entirely new aesthetic and ethical network of people and practices. This workshop session aims to explore ‘new ways of transforming artistic practices, research, and education grounded in the theory of ‘situatedness’ through practice rather than theory. Manifesting a student-centred pedagogical approach developed as part of the doctoral education at Stockholm University of the Arts, participants are invited to share experiences from their own artistic or arts pedagogy practice in order to map, situate, and orient understandings which are common to this group of people, in this place, at this moment in time.

A Learning Ecosystem for Creation and Innovation
Marianne van Bommel, Sam Maske, Melike Karaslan and Niels van Rijsbergen, AVANS University of Applied Sciences, Netherlands
Breakout Session 1: Wednesday 10 May 16:30 – 18:30

Marianne van Bommel and her associates present findings of an experiment in the spring of 2023 with 150 students. Discover how they act as a learning ecosystem in an assemblage of different parts that (may) contaminate each other. Ten students from five different programmes and three lecturers form a research group to set up an evolving ecosystem for the creative cluster at Avans University of Applied Sciences. They investigate what the value and meaning could be of concepts such as collectivity, delay, precarity, a circular way of thinking, and situatedness. Through this type of work, can we allow alternative educational models and organisational forms to emerge that challenge existing neoliberal trends within education?

Practicing educational futures: Radical pedagogy as worldmaking
Tamara de Groot, Rotterdam Arts and Sciences Lab, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands
Breakout Session 2: Thursday 11 May 09:30 – 11:30

During this presentation, De Groot introduces the praxis of pedagogical worldmaking as a speculative strategy to practice educational futures in the present and works with participants to explore how this strategy can support the imagining and enacting of higher education that is more socially and ecologically just. In her research and teaching practice, she explores how transgressing and transcending the boundaries between arts and academic education and knowledge production necessitates pedagogical approaches that are multi-sensorial, situated, and affirmative. Over the past years, De Groot has been designing and teaching the experimental minor ‘Re-Imagining Tomorrow through Arts and Sciences’. To be able to describe what happened during this reshaping, she developed the notion of pedagogical worldmaking influenced by the concepts of queer worldmaking by José Esteban Muñoz and Donna Haraway’s worlding.

Fashion Design Teaching for Sustainability: Fashion Design for the Appreciation of Local Identity
Alexandra Cruchinho, Lusófona University, Portugal
Breakout Session 2: Thursday 11 May 09:30 – 11:30

In most situations, the knowledge and skills that maintain some of the main traditions and cultural manifestations such as local handicrafts are held by people of advanced age. The involvement of these people and the appreciation of their knowledge gives them a new dynamic in the society in which they live. Making these citizens active is also one of the main focuses of the projects we have been developing. Thus, in a first phase, we developed the recognition of traditional artistic manifestations, handicrafts such as embroidery, lace, patchwork, etc. After identifying the fundamental elements for the characterisation of the cultural heritage of a region, we try to explore the knowledge around this theme. Fashion emerges as a value-added factor for the creation of new products that result from the reinterpretation of these ancestral technologies that characterise each region. This presentation demonstrates how bringing this knowledge into the classroom context is the challenge we set for ourselves and the students.

Transformative Reparative Pedagogy: Mending as Utopian Practice
Sanne Koevoets, Erasmus University Platform for Design, Impact and Transition, Willem de Kooning Academy, Netherlands
Breakout Session 4: Thursday 11 May 15:00 – 17:00

The project ‘Transformative Reparative Pedagogy’ invites students to participate in mending as a way of embodied and affective thinking-together-with-objects. In this lecture-workshop, Koevoets explores the possibilities of transformative reparative pedagogy and research-creation together with the participants. At the start, she introduces the participants to an accessible visible mending technique. Together with participants she will form a mending circle, so that they can explore its potential as architecture and diagram of transformative knowledge transfer and recuperative sociality. The mending circle will continue throughout the session, with participants being encouraged to work throughout or take breaks to listen or talk as they feel fit. Participants are invited to contribute to the collaborative vision on utopian mending in art and science.

Creating a connective performance practice in the here and now: Introduction of a creative-performative model
Lies Colman, Lies Colman, Royal Conservatoire The Hague, Netherlands & Royal Conservatoire Antwerp, Belgium
Breakout Session 4: Thursday 11 May 15:00 – 17:00

The position and profile of ‘the’ classical music performer is increasingly questioned — culturally, dramaturgically, pedagogically, socially… The centuries-old paradigm of the virtuoso execution of the untouchable written score is being replaced or complemented by a sociocultural concept of music, where the performance is considered to be a functional praxis within a specific social-cultural situation, an embodied and social act instead of fact, a highly diverse social praxis within an integrated network of socially situated music-makers and listeners. This presentation invites the audience to join the investigation into the individual as well as social and communicative dimension of collaborative artistic praxis and offers a proposal for a ‘creative-performative model’ as a methodological tool.

Plug-in: A Transdisciplinary Audiovisual Approach
Pedro Moreira, University of Évora, Portugal
Breakout Session 4: Thursday 11 May 15:00 – 17:00

Created by EArtes student Pedro Moreira, the ‘Plug-in’ project, developed within the framework of the research initiation scholarship ‘Summer With Science_Magallanes’ at R&D CESEM – Center for Studies in Sociology and Musical Aesthetics, oriented by Professor Ana Telles, sought to welcome new students at the University of Évora’s School of Fine Arts, promoting an interaction between themselves, the community, the school, as well as its materials and spaces. Based on a multidisciplinary and interactive premise, different games and workshops were promoted, using different techniques and forms of artistic expression, as a way of creating an inter- and transdisciplinary artistic object, making use of the human and infrastructural potential of arts. Join this session to find out more.

The Curiosity Incubator
Mel Brown, Bridgette Ashton, Arts University Plymouth, United Kingdom
Breakout Session 4: Thursday 11 May 15:00 – 17:00

In ’Playing for Time’, Lucy Neal introduces the driving force behind her book as a desire to understand the role our imaginations and creative skills play in reimagining a world in which life on Earth is cherished and sustained. In our cross-uni project ‘the Curiosity Incubator’ we invited our students to work together, sharing their subject skills in pursuit of creative problem solving to pursue visions of a better world. The project began with three workshops — HOME, SUSTENANCE, and FOLK — each oriented towards specific targets within the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. For ELIA we would like to recreate our FOLK workshop. purposefully situating ourselves off this troubled planet to explore troublesome futures and imagine fantastic solutions. We invite you to playfully consider: what will society/culture look like? What artefacts will be made? What stories will be told?

How we do what we do: Challenges of the eco-shift in art education
Jovana Karaulic, University of Arts in Belgrade, Serbia
Breakout Session 4: Thursday 11 May 15:00 – 17:00

As a co-founder of the initiative Green Art Incubator and Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, Jovana will focus session on understanding the possibilities of eco-shift in thinking of green management and the challenges of arts as an agent of positive change. In order to understand the new paradigm in an old structure it is necessary to learn and rethink ‘how we do what we do’ in a relation to overall aesthetic and production philosophy. Through the interactive collaborative workshop, we will try to explore the eco-turn of art practices, research methods, and education as a powerful platform for understanding the complex matrix of environmental and social crises.

Midville; How not to teach fine art
Steve Hawley, Professor Emeritus, Manchester Metropolitan University, and Steve Dutton, Professor Emeritus, Bath Spa University, United Kingdom
Breakout Session 5: Friday 12 May 10:00 – 11:30

In 1967 two sociologists decided to study how art students became socialised and spent three years observing and recording verbatim the teaching at ‘Midville College of Art’, actually Lanchester School of Art, Coventry. The resulting book, Art Students Observed (1973), has become a classic of art teaching literature. 55 years later we have interviewed the same students and asked them about those experiences.  Their reflections combined with on-the-spot observations in the studio, and sometimes savage critical assessments by tutors, are presented as a video that forms the basis of a critical debate about how much has changed in the art school. What happened in Coventry then became the default mode for contemporary galleries around the world in the subsequent years. The proposal puts the students’ own views and words at the heart of a critical debate about teaching methods, and who exactly the Fine Art experience is for.

The photographic studio, transformation and preservation
Olívia Da Silva & Adriana Baptista, Escola Superior de Media Artes e Design do P.Porto, Vila do Conde uniMAD, Unidade de Investigação de Media Artes e Design
Breakout Session 5: Friday 12 May 10:00 – 11:30

Reconfiguring the photographic studio as a context for portraiture requires diversified forms of research using digital practices, but also sustainable processes; the way in which the present recovers the past, within or outside the situation in which it occurs, and the way in which, in each photograph, the present can construct the past in a new and coherent context. This photographic project works on the two lives of photography as process and product. One of the lives runs between the technique and the goals of who builds, produces, and manipulates the photograph; the other life blurs the boundary between explicit and implicit by who, seeing, retrieves, values, and interprets the heritage made into a new photographic context. Both lives leave the time in which photographs are made; that is, both resort to a search for everything that provides those who remain in the photograph with the possibility of keeping active the way in which life is/was based in a context. Join to find out more.