Epistemic Imaginaries (The Pirate Academy)

Epistemic Imaginaries addresses creative pedagogical initiatives and their relation to current challenges, from educational to environmental. This includes reflecting on pertinent issues related to art and education today, and the ways in which self-organized learning situations work at reframing education alongside localized struggles and challenges. If much of contemporary art tends toward issues of knowledge production, what knowledge practices dominate? Is there a need for greater epistemic imagination, as well as recognition for alternative learning situations?

Central to the project is underscoring creative pedagogical initiatives as forms of festivity, appreciating how such initiatives support and celebrate new ways of being together. From feasting on ideas to hosting dissident knowledges, from blending personal and collective, discursive and somatic methods, to crafting sustainable knowledge environments and bodily care, creative approaches to art and education are underscored as important interventions that equate learning with joy, affection and communal flourishing.

The research is developed collaboratively between Katía Truijen and Brandon LaBelle. A related publication brings together international contributions from artists, activists, researchers, curators and scholars active in new forms of educational work. Including essays, interviews and documentation of related projects, the publication is launched in November 2024 by Errant Bodies Press, Berlin.

On Pirate Pedagogies /

After returning to presencial teaching in the fall of 2021 at the Bergen Art Academy, I started a series of evening gatherings, inviting students into a more experimental format, which went under the title The Pirate Academy. I organized each monthly session around a particular theme, understanding each session as a “research festival” where discussions, readings, workshops, heart-to-heart talks, performances, explorative gestures and ways of being together could be given room. Taking place over 2 or 3 nights, the Academy quickly developed as a parallel structure to the institution, offering an alternative time and space for sharing ideas, encountering new methods, for playing and experiencing education in new ways. For myself, The Pirate Academy allowed for discovering a diversity of knowledge practices through invited guests I was able to include, as well as for reinvigorating my own sense for what teaching can be. Through the Academy, pedagogy emerged more fully as an act of care – in which my whole self was involved. Caring for setting the conditions for welcoming students and guests, for enabling a more horizontal, process-based approach, caring for the content of each session, to offer guiding thoughts and questions that might carry over the nightly gatherings, and caring for the relationships that is the real material and energy holding it all together.

The Pirate Academy is an experimental meeting point aimed at creative research practices and methods, as well as for figuring processes of co-learning. It draws upon pirate culture and practices as a guide for mobilizing a range of inquiries and interventions, and for squatting the arena of knowledge production central to artistic research. If, as Steven Connor poses, knowledge acts as the governing economic, technological, and cultural material and means today, what types of anti-hegemonic practices can be crafted from within the institution of knowledge itself, that of the Academy? Are there counter-narratives to be configured, that might queer knowledge production as a production all-too-readily instrumentalized in the service of the next funding application? The Pirate Academy is an open source academy bringing together an intentionally diverse assemblage of perspectives and practices, supporting speculative, transversal, wilding and inoperative approaches. 

The Pirate Academy is taking place once a month at the Bergen Art Academy (2021-2022) and staged as a Research Party over three nights. Including invited artists, scholars, activists, cooks and commoners, The Pirate Academy is understood less as a ship and more as a fog spreading its diffuse and intoxicating vapors.

For details on the specific sessions see here.

Following the experience of The Pirate Academy as it took place in Bergen, the project continues in new ways – through the collaboration with Katía Truijen, and our interest in Epistemic Imaginaries, recognizing the positive proliferation of self-organized learning projects and platforms, and through further research into pirate pedagogies.