The Pirate Academy

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 the monthly sessions 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 would be given room. Taking place over two to three nights, the Academy quickly developed as a parallel structure to the more formal institution, offering an alternative time and space for sharing ideas, encountering new methods, for playing and experiencing learning 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 the conditions that would welcome students and guests, enabling a more horizontal, process-based approach, and caring for the content of each session, to offer guiding thoughts and questions that might carry over the nightly gatherings, along with caring for the relationships that are 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 different contexts.