BlackBerry Summer School Academy margin is a week of lectures, workshops, explorations of various micro-landscapes in the vicinity of Topolovo/Topol / / in the vicinity of Udine, readings, walks, cohabitation and community learning on topics related to environmental humanities and environmental care.
The summer school will be 4. and 10. August 2025 held in the vicinity of Topolovo / Topol <url>.
For the fourth time this year, we invited 15 participants to join us at the margin Academy Summer School, which this year is entitled Radio gardening . The term was borrowed from radio artist and researcher Kate Donovan, who used it in 2018 for the Datscha Radio Project , in which she explores the intersection of gardening and radio art, and later this term also became the title of the project of the artist Mona / de Paul / Antunes. We chose it as a call to think together what radio is, how it is made, what it does and how it creates movement between people and places .
On Sunday, 10. in August, there will also be a day of public events, in which participants of the summer school and some other artists will be presented with film screenings, talks and musical interventions. Learn more on the official website .
Gardening in this context is not just a metaphor, but a methodology. We draw inspiration from the conceptual parallel between radio creation and gardening developed by Kate Donovan in her work Radio as Relation : "Radio can be nurtured in a similar way to a garden: we can set up structures that allow 'organic' development, sow seeds, prepare the soil, define areas, do research, prune individual parts and admire how or which new – unknown/unsuspected/unexpected – seeds fly in with the wind. [ ... ] The Radio and the garden share that they can be understood as temporary networks; the garden is a complex interspecific network (with parasitic and symbiotic tendencies) with trans-scalar effects, which is (at least in theory) controlled, maintained and nurtured by man – the same applies to a technological Radio Network. And yet we must admit that, despite the often clear boundaries, both are also elusive figures who, to some extent, always resist human control."(Kate Donovan, Radio as Relation. Listening across art research, technologies and the more-than-human. Doctoral dissertation, University of Potsdam, 2025.)
We wonder what it means to take care of the radio, just as we take care of the garden. What does pruning mean in the radio sense-what do we cut and why? What things can take root without our plan-and how to stay open to them? How could we design radio structures that not only transmit but also pollinate – allowing ideas, voices and attitudes to travel elsewhere and take root in unexpected places? What if radio was understood not as a signal transmitted from one to many, but as a temporary, changing network of relationships – symbiotic, parasitic, cooperative?
The Program and concept of this year's summer school is curated by the BlackBerry collective in collaboration with radio artist and designer Jack Bard Modulell, who helped them establish BlackBerry Radio in 2021. A summer school on radio gardening will offer time and space to explore these issues together. As in previous performances, participants were invited to submit proposals for activities, workshops, lectures, experiments, presentations or forms of discussion exploring the practice, theory and politics of radio.
The margin Academy Summer School is part of the margin Academy project for 2025, which is being created with the financial support of Friuli Venezia Giulia and the Government Office of the Republic of Slovenia for Slovenians abroad. This year's Edition is being produced as part of the project Radio druga / the Other Radio from the official go! 2025.
Language information
Event language: EN, it, en
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