Artist Ped­a­gogy and Artis­tic Think­ing: Ab­stracts 28 Au­gust 2026

Published 28.5.2026 | Updated 28.5.2026

Thalia Raftopoulou

Sound and Listening Practices in Artist Training at the Athens School of Fine Arts 

Stemming from a multisensorial exploration of the perceived Athenian urban environment, the hybrid course Art, City, Sound, conducted at the Athens School of Fine Arts, Greece, by artist and researcher Thalia Raftopoulou, is found on sound and listening practices. It approaches art pedagogy through different ways of mediating in artistic training and art- making, as well as their textual and theoretical grounding. The paper will present the methodologies of the course, focusing on how the art works made during the semesters expand beyond sonic explorations and materialize through various situated artistic positions that embody the artist-students’ personal concerns with broader contemporary, shifting and urgent issues. These include questions of life and struggles in the contemporary city, injustices in labour environments, gender rights and identity transitions, and ways of tracing different terrains from the personal to the public. The aim of the paper is to bring fourth sound studies and listening practices as catalysts in deciphering different levels of perceiving the sense of place, the sense of self and community in artist training and art-making. At the same time, it seeks to unravel the course’s pedagogical approach- one that incorporates mediation and attentive listening as pedagogical tools to energize sympoietic acts, fundamentally challenging the traditional teacher-student power structure and instigate more relational routes of knowledge flow and creation in situated research-making. The presentation will be framed with specific examples and elements from the course, including workshops, sound walks, field trips, as well as samples of process and final presentations.

Bio

Thalia Raftopoulou is an artist and researcher working at the intersections of contemporary art and sound studies. As an educator, she has conducted the course Art, City, Sound in the Department of Fine Arts at the Athens School of Fine Arts, Greece. Her creative projects explore the relationship between art and the everyday, focusing on attentive listening as perceptive root and artistic practice. Working across drawing, video, installations, and listening practices, she investigates processes of becoming, transitionality, orality, matter, vibration, and voice. Her work addresses issues of public space, domesticity, acoustic ecology, and the ecology of fear, while critically challenging epistemological rigidity and ableism. She holds a Ph.D. from ASFA, Department of Theory and Art History, entitled “Sound and Listening as Artistic Practice in the Athenian Apartment Building”, an MFA in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies from Bauhaus-University Weimar, Germany, and a Fine Arts degree from ASFA, Greece.

Winnie Huang

Sanctuary in Practice: Resonance, Response-ability, and Embodied Technique in Transdisciplinary Arts Pedagogy 

This paper proposes a model of artistic pedagogy designed as sanctuary: an intentional and relational infrastructure that supports student agency, shared inquiry, and imaginative resilience in a time marked by social fragmentation and uncertainty. Drawing on over a decade of facilitating practice-based laboratories across European higher arts institutions—and informed by my interdisciplinary artistic career spanning performance, composition, curation, and artistic direction—the presentation demonstrates how artistic thinking evolves when students work across music, dance, theatre, and performance art through a shared gestural foundation rather than discipline-specific hierarchies. This cross-arts environment fosters attunement, collective responsibility, and a renewed sense of artistic possibility.

The pedagogical approach develops from two strands of my artistic research and multi-role practice: the Musical-Gestural Perspective (MGP) and Transdisciplining the Self. The MGP treats gesture as a common artistic language, allowing students with diverse training to collaborate on neutral ground. Within this shared terrain, learning unfolds through the triad of resonance, response-ability, and embodied technique. Resonance (Rosa, 2016) describes the mutual attunement that shapes creative decision-making; response-ability (Haraway, 2016) highlights the ethical readiness to remain open to emerging possibilities; and embodied technique reframes skill as perceptual and attentional engagement rather than technical correctness (Dewey, 1934).

A brief example illustrates these dynamics: students compose, co-compose, and perform their own and each other’s Musical-Gestural works, then curate and programme these pieces in multiple configurations, discovering how shifts in context, intention, and audience reshape meaning. Silent gestures, sonic materials, body, space, and performative actions become tools for exploring how timing and presence generate new works and new interpretations. Many described it as the first environment where experimentation felt both safe and genuinely challenging, and where insights are meaningfully reapplied within their own discipline-specific pathways.

Crucially, sanctuary extends beyond artistic exploration. Each session includes reflection on professional realities—fundinies, documentation, communication, and articulating artistic value—embedding this pedagogy within broader curricular needs and preparing students for sustainable, imaginative futures in the arts.

Bio

Winnie Huang is an educator, performer, composer and gestural performance artist, whose work explores embodiment, notation, and collaborative practices within contemporary and experimental music. Born in China and raised in Australia, she has built a multifaceted European career spanning performance, composition, curation, and artistic direction of her ensemble soundinitiative in Paris (FR). She is Associate Professor of Research in Music Performance at the Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana (CH), and has previously taught at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln (DE) and the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp/University of Antwerp (BE), where she developed long-running transdisciplinary laboratory formats that continue to shape her pedagogical approach.

Her artistic research investigates interdependence, embodied technique, and the generative role of gesture, forming the basis for her frameworks of the Musical-Gestural Perspective and Transdisciplining the Self. As artiste étoile of the 2025 Lucerne Festival (CH), she presented projects ranging from one-to-one performance to participatory public events, highly detailed composed concert gestural works incorporating electronics, video, lighting and staging, further extending her enquiry into sanctuary, collaboration, and transdisciplinary artistic identity.

Daniel Hirsch

Teaching in my own voice: Is teaching an artistic practice? 

Why does teaching feel like jazz performance to me? This was the question that prompted my doctoral project, which explored the connections between my jazz training and my high school English teaching. One fruitful resonance that emerged between these two fields is the artistic idea of shaping a unique voice or sound, which is drawn from my jazz experience and practice. Within a jazz ensemble, an individual’s sound and musical ideas can be influenced and developed by the sounds and ideas of their fellow musicians. I came to recognise this artistic idea as a core element of my pedagogy and how my teaching progresses in relation to myself, my students, our classroom, our learning. I term this ‘own voice’. As a practice, own voice is dialogic – a cyclical process of heteroglossia – thriving in the creative tension between an individual and their social contexts. In my case, this was a teacher in a classroom, in a school, in a system, with students, and colleagues, and structures, and so on. Own voice describes the process of crafting one’s individual sound through listening, emulation, risk-taking and mistakes, and reflection—things quite common to jazz music. This notion repositions the practice of teaching by focusing on a teacher’s experience and subjectivity. Own voice suggests ways of thinking about and being/doing teaching that are personal, collaborative, and creative.

In this presentation, I reflexively engage with my own voice as a teacher and jazz musician in order to critically analyse the connections between teaching practice and artistic practice, teacher research and artistic research. The notion of own voice considers how artistic thinking emerges from and influences teaching. What if we researched teaching using artistic research methods? Is teaching an artistic practice? Is the teacher an artist?

Bio

Dr. Daniel Hirsch (he/him) is a musician, teacher, and music and education researcher living, working, and playing on the unceded lands of the Turrbal and Yuggera Peoples in Meanjin/Brisbane. He’s a graduate of the Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University and his doctoral thesis (2023) examines how his jazz performance training informs his high school English teaching. He is curious about the dialogue between jazz and teaching and how improvisation bridges these two inherently improvisational fields. As a musician, teacher, and researcher Daniel’s work is grounded in improvisation, critical and creative pedagogies, dialogic and reflective practices, creativity, and collaboration. Daniel has been a high school Music and English teacher for ten years and has experience in, and is an advocate for, community-based arts. Further to this, Daniel is interested in writing and performing music, writing poetry, and drawing

Pauliina Pesonen

Nordic Art School pioneering artist pedagogy 

Nordic Art School (1984-2018) was a radical art school. A small and quickly responding school which was run by the rector and one headteacher. Yearly 30-35 visiting artist teachers from all over the Nordic countries came to teach for two-week periods.The visiting teacher system was one of a kind, creating a non-authoritarian atmosphere where people were working towards a mutual goal. The aim of Nordic Art School was to give its students a solid ground for studies at academy, university or post graduate level and over 75% of the students secured their place in higher education.

In my research I have been digging deep in the archive of Nordic Art School, from hand written diary entries of the visiting artist teachers to reports of the school’s inspectors and correspondence over 30 years searching for clues to explain what made this school one of the best. “Art really lives here and has pure physical contact with contemporary art. I don’t even know of another art college or academy that is so actively in touch with what is happening in the visual arts.” said Carolus Enckell, a Finnish artist, writer and educator, in one of the interviews found in the archive. Origins of this unique pedagogy has been drafted by findings in this and other nordic archives and by interviewing nordic visual artists, former teachers and students to record their take on artist pedagogy by Nordic Art School and its influence on their own work.

In my presentation I highlight some of the main characteristics of Nordic Art School’s artist pedagogy and methodologies which could be guiding to other successful future pedagogies in arts. Bio
Pauliina Pesonen is a visual artist and doctoral researcher at University of Lapland focusing on artists’ pedagogy of Nordic Art School/Pohjoismainen taidekoulu/Nordiska konstskolan (Kokkola 1984-2018) with funding from the Finnish Cultural Foundation. For more than 10 years she has worked as an artist pedagog in museums and schools in integration projects and with various groups. She curates annual contemporary arts event, Ars Weikkola, in the village where she lives and works: an event which emphasises artist fees, unusual locations and new audiences.

Bio

Pauliina Pesonen is a visual artist and doctoral researcher at University of Lapland focusing on artists’ pedagogy of Nordic Art School/Pohjoismainen taidekoulu/Nordiska konstskolan (Kokkola 1984-2018) with funding from the Finnish Cultural Foundation. For more than 10 years she has worked as an artist pedagog in museums and schools in integration projects and with various groups. She curates annual contemporary arts event, Ars Weikkola, in the village where she lives and works: an event which emphasises artist fees, unusual locations and new audiences.

Timothy Smith

Stimming as Art Methodology to Artist Pedagogy 

This session introduces a neurodivergent-affirmative art methodology of stimming and its implication for artist pedagogy.  Contrary to the prevailing pathology framing of stimming as deficited and undesirable behavior, neurodivergent-affirmative approaches reorient stimming as vitally enriching and purposeful practices of sensory and emotional stimulation particularly for neurodivergent folks. This session aims to not only recast stimming away from its denigrated framing; it also seeks to illuminate the mutually galvanizing relationship between stimming and artistic expression. Indeed, in recent years, artists and arts practitioners have explored stimming not just as an element of their artwork, but as fundamental to their practice. By way of exploring these specific artistic practices, this session proposes an art methodology of stimming as it informs artist pedagogy through its empowering reframing in and through artmaking.

Bio

Timothy J. Smith (they/them), PhD, MFA, is a multiply neurodivergent artist, educator, and University Researcher at University of the Arts Helsinki. Their research engages critical disability and neurodiversity studies approaches to arts education. Their artistic practice explores stimming as a methodology, which informs their teaching and research.

Sarah Rowles

Helping students navigate the freedoms of fine art studio culture and practice

A methodology of ‘not knowing’ (Fisher and Fortnum, 2015) is often thought of as central to artist pedagogy, practice, and professional life. Within the undergraduate fine art curriculum, it underpins studio culture where up to 80% of time can be allocated to self-directed practice so that students can learn to become independent practitioners. However, some students can struggle with the ‘unbearable freedoms’ (Lindström, 2016) bound up with this way of working, which can lead to them feeling marginalised or at risk of withdrawing from their programme of study (Yorke and Vaughan, 2012). Drawing on findings from my research, this talk will introduce some of the curricula factors that might help students navigate the demands of fine art studio culture. After my presentation (if time allows) I will invite attendees to share their own examples of ‘what works’.   

Bio

Dr. Sarah Rowles is a postdoctoral researcher in fine art pedagogy at Uniarts Helsinki where she is looking at how the MFA at the Academy of Fine Arts prepares students to become professional artists. In 2024 she completed her Doctorate at the Institute of Education, University College London where her thesis examined ‘The role of undergraduate fine art education in the production of professional artists’ in a UK context. Sarah is the Founding Director of Q-Art, an events and publishing organisation that shares approaches to teaching art across higher education institutions. She has worked as a lecturer in art education and fine art contextual studies, and as a researcher in art education and pedagogy. 

Timo Tähkänen

Bucking Listening: A Queer-Inflected Practice for Artist Pedagogy 

In this presentation, I introduce bucking listening as a queer-inflected artistic and pedagogical practice that resists normative expectations of clarity, coherence, and control. Drawing from my artistic doctoral research at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki, I develop bucking listening as a method emerging from my embodied queer position, while remaining open to anyone regardless of identity. It describes a wilful, non-compliant, and affectively attuned way of listening that invites uncertainty, rupture, and alternative forms of meaning.

The concept builds on Annamari Vänskä’s notion of vikurointi—bucking—as a resistant, unruly stance, and Sara Ahmed’s idea of queerness as an orientation that turns us away from normative lines. In my artistic practice, bucking listening enables me to move toward narrative breaks, emotional intensities, and embodied discomfort rather than smoothing or resolving them. This sensibility is rooted both in my early artistic work within care communities and in my later teaching experience, where I have supported art students in developing their artistic identities through studio visits and thesis supervision. In these contexts, listening becomes an ethical relation and a mode of being with others that transforms all participants.

In a time marked by ecological crisis, growing inequalities, and polarised public discourse, I argue that listening is an urgent artistic and pedagogical intervention. Bucking listening challenges market-driven values of efficiency and productivity by making room for vulnerability, ambiguity, and incomplete expressions—forms of knowledge often marginalised in artistic education. It foregrounds queer affect as a meaningful mode of understanding and cultivates more empathetic and dialogical encounters between students, teachers, and artworks.

The presentation is proposed as a performative lecture delivered in drag. By shifting my embodied presence through drag, I extend bucking listening into the lecture form itself, using performance as a method to destabilise authority, trouble pedagogical norms, and activate listening as a reciprocal, affective, and critically open relation.

Bio

Timo Tähkänen (FIN) is a visual artist, drag performer, and doctoral researcher at Uniarts Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts. Their artistic research explores queer listening in visual art practice and examines how listening can open alternative, relational and affective ways of approaching artistic work. Supported by the Kone Foundation, their research develops the concept of bucking listening, a method that questions normative expectations of coherence, clarity, and control in both artmaking and teaching.

Alongside their research, Tähkänen has taught in several art education contexts, where they have supported students in developing their artistic identities through studio visits, conversation-based teaching, and process-oriented guidance. Their earlier work in community and care environments continues to influence their interest in sensitivity, responsiveness, and the role of listening within artistic practice. As both an artist and a drag performer, Tähkänen works across performance, installation, and text, often exploring queer embodiment, relationality, and different modes of artistic presence.

Katie Tomlinson and Chester Tenneson

On Queer Belonging in Art School: Queer Research Group (QRG) 

This presentation examines Chester Tenneson’s Fine Art Queer Research Group (QRG) at Manchester School of Art, exploring how it fosters queer belonging, supports LGBTQIA+ students, and promotes academic, professional and personal development within the art school context. The QRG, an extracurricular initiative, provides a voluntary, non-hierarchical, and trust-based pedagogical space.

Drawing on a collaboratively analysed semi-structured interview between Katie Tomlinson and Chester Tenneson, the presentation highlights how the QRG supports students’ confidence, creative experimentation, and academic engagement while fostering connections that extend beyond their undergraduate studies. Key themes include queer collectivism, solidarity, responsive pedagogy, and the importance of safe, affirming environments for marginalised students. The discussion will emphasise how belonging, care, and visibility are central to creative and professional development, showing how inclusive, student-centred practices can reshape the art school experience.

This 15-minute co-presented talk will be delivered through a structured conversation between the two authors, supported by slides, images, and documentation of QRG activities. Attendees will gain insight into practical strategies for fostering inclusive learning environments, the role of queer networks in professional development, and the broader cultural and social implications of cultivating belonging in art education.

Bios

Katie Tomlinson is a visual artist and Lecturer in Fine Art (Painting) at Manchester School of Art, UK. Her research explores queer-feminist perspectives in contemporary painting, with a focus on heteronormativity, body politics, and Femme representations throughout the history of Western art. Her pedagogical practice reflects these interests, developing inclusive approaches that support and affirm diverse student identities. Other research includes the ongoing collaborative project ‘Painting Gender: Intersectional, Trans+, Non-Binary, Gender-Diverse, Feminist and Queer Perspectives in Contemporary British Painting (2015–2025)’, conducted with Chester Tenneson.

Chester Tenneson is a visual artist, Lecturer in Fine Art, Art & Design EDI Lead, and founder of the Fine Art Queer Research Group (QRG) at Manchester School of Art, UK. His research examines the absurdities within everyday institutional design and authority, exploring the idiosyncratic nature of commonplace objects, language, and social systems. His position as a transgender man informs his research, looking to the absurdity within the design of the cis-heteronormative world. His pedagogical practice reflects these interests, developing inclusive approaches that support and affirm LGBTQIA+ student identities. Other research includes the ongoing collaborative project ‘Painting Gender: Intersectional, Trans+, Non-Binary, Gender-Diverse, Feminist and Queer Perspectives in Contemporary British Painting (2015–2025)’, conducted with Katie Tomlinson.

Ngọc Trần

Teaching in Between: A Feminist Pedagogical Approach to Graphic Design Education in Vietnam

 As artist pedagogies evolve to address inequality, fragmentation, and polarisation in contemporary societies, this research examines how feminist pedagogical approaches can reshape graphic design education to better respond to these challenges. Positioning feminist pedagogy as a form of artist pedagogy that cultivates artistic thinking, this study investigates both the absence and potential integration of feminist pedagogical practices in design pedagogy, specifically examining the context of the researcher’s workplace, British University Vietnam.

Using an intersectional lens and Patricia Hill Collins’ matrix of domination, the study problematises inherited non-feminist practices through historical and contemporary cases (including the Bauhaus legacy and Southeast Asian student accounts). Through action research, the researcher designed, implemented, and documented three workshops with two student cohorts. Drawing on bell hooks, Thích Nhất Hạnh, and Paulo Freire, the project develops an interpretive framework comprising five principles—mastery, voice, authority, positionality, and care—and applies it to plan and facilitate feminism-informed workshops.

Findings from autoethnographic notes, reflective questionnaires, and focus groups reveal that feminist pedagogical approaches enhance student engagement, emotional support, and holistic learning experiences. However, the research also addresses implementation challenges, particularly for young female educators navigating institutional power dynamics.

Bio

Trần Phương Thảo Ngọc (Ngọc Trần) is a design educator and graphic designer based in Vietnam. She graduated with first-class honours in Contemporary Creative Practice: Graphic Design from British University Vietnam in 2021 and completed a Master of Research in the Arts at Arts University Bournemouth in 2025, focusing on feminist pedagogical practices in design education.

Currently a Teaching Fellow in the School of Communications & Creative Industries at British University Vietnam, Ngọc has been teaching for over four years. Her teaching philosophy centres on fostering inclusive, supportive learning environments where students feel empowered to explore their creative voices. Drawing from her research on feminist pedagogy, she integrates principles of care, positionality, and collaborative learning into her practice, encouraging students to critically engage with design as a tool for social change. Alongside her academic work, Ngọc maintains connections to the design industry through creative collaborations and freelance projects.

Madeleine Karlsson

The World falls Silent – a practice-led performance on ageism and its effect on the dancer 

engaging with embodied knowledge, lived experience, and intergenerational dialogue. The World Falls Silent is a practice-led performance project that explores how societal narratives about ageing infiltrate the dancer’s body, shaping possibilities, limitations, and the perceived legitimacy of continuing artistic practice later in life. Through improvisation, reflective writing, and collaborative inquiry with older dancers, the project investigates how ageist assumptions become internalised, how they silence artistic agency, and how pedagogical approaches might counter these effects.

The project positions the dancer’s body as both a site of resistance and a repository of tacit knowledge. Drawing on artistic thinking as a form of situated, embodied research, the work seeks to reveal how ageing bodies generate new artistic propositions—ones that are still often overlooked within dominant discourses of virtuosity and productivity. The performance acts as a pedagogical tool, making visible the subtle ways ageism is enacted and offering alternative imaginaries that prioritise presence, nuance, and accumulated expertise.

In the context of the conference’s focus on societal challenges, this proposal argues that ageism—though often marginal in discussions of inequality—significantly impacts artistic education. If artists are to act as societal change-makers, pedagogies must recognise ageing as a creative asset. The project therefore asks: How can we reimagine teaching practices so that they honour the shifting capacities of ageing bodies? How might we cultivate learning environments where vulnerability, slowness, and longevity are seen as generative artistic forces?

By sharing excerpts from the performance process, pedagogical reflections, and insights from participating dancers, this presentation contributes to broader conversations on how artist pedagogies can evolve to promote inclusion, agency, and sustainable artistic futures in uncertain times.

The presentation will also outline specific studio methodologies developed during the project—scores, relational tasks, and modes of attentional training—that support dancers in recognising and reclaiming embodied authority. These methods highlight how practice-led research can inform curricular development and provide concrete tools for educators seeking to expand notions of artistic potential across the lifespan.

Bio

Madeleine Karlsson is a choreographer, dancer, and educator. She holds a master’s in choreography and a teacher’s degree in dance from Stockholm University of the Arts as well as a dancer-exam from the Ballet Academy in Stockholm. Her artistic practice explores themes such as intimacy, vulnerability, and belonging. As a choreographer, she has presented approximately 35 works, including Voicing (2025), Hope (2024) and The World Falls Silent (2023). Her award-winning film Shades (2022) has received international recognition. She is artistic director of Maka Dance Productions and holds a teaching position at the Royal Swedish Ballet School in contemporary dance. Her current research focuses on embodied knowledge, aging in dance, and the role of reflective practice in shaping sustainable artistic and pedagogical environments. She frequently collaborates with interdisciplinary artists and engages in international residencies, with a growing interest in how choreographic processes can foster resilience, dialogue, and long-term artistic development across generations. She also contributes to Nordic and European networks for dance education, presenting workshops and lectures on artistic process and pedagogy. Her work increasingly examines how collaborative creation can support inclusive practices and nourish evolving artistic identities.

Alex Arteaga

Sensitive sense-making. Outlining sensitive cognition in the framework of the enactive approach 

This lecture will present the main traits of “sensitive cognition”, an autonomous form of thinking to be outlined as an specification of the enactive concept of cognition through transdisciplinary practices of artistic research. The attempt to define “sensitive cognition” as “sensitive sense-making” is understood here as a fundamental contribution to the idea of an “artistic thinking”, based on the hypothesis that any form of art practices, and therefore of artistic thinking, find one of their foundations in particular mobilizations of the senses.

In a first section, this lecture will briefly introduce the main traits of the enactive approach and will posit the hypothesis that the enactive concept of cognition is an adequate alternative to (western) epistemology for developing sensitive cognition, i.e. a variety of thinking radically different from propositional thinking. On this basis, the main traits of “sensitive sense-making” will be introduced: sensitive cognition as “skillful action” that can be realized in any possible medium; the integration of the subject and the object of cognition and their environment in a non-hierarchically distributed meshwork of cognitive agencies; “sensing” as the variety of intentional action characteristic of sensitive cognition and that, as such, operates prior to perception; “sensitive attention,” “sensitive awareness”, and “sensitive reflection” as specifications of sensing; “intuitive evidences” as the genuine results of the performance of sensitive cognition; and eventually, the transformative nature of sensitive sense-making. As conclusion, some hypothesis and open questions in regard to possible relationships between sensitive sense-making and forms of artistic pedagogy will be shared with the audience in order to connect the two thematic focusses of this conference.

Bio

Alex Arteaga is a transdisciplinary artist-researcher inquiring into the co-emergence of selves and more-than-human environments, and the cognitive basis of artistic research through long-term research projects such as Architecture of Embodiment (https:// www.architecture-embodiment.org/) and Contingent Agencies (https://contingentagencies.uniak.ac.at/). Arteaga has realized installations and essays in the media of sound, video, photography and text and is the author of the monograph transient senses (2016), editor of Architectures of Embodiment (2020) and co-editor of Architecture without walls (2016) Aurality and Environment (2017), and Contingent Agencies. Inquiring the emergence of atmospheres (2025). He is currently developing the artistic research project The Sense of Common Self (https://www.uniarts.fi/en/projects/the-sense-ofcommon-self/) in the framework of How to live together in Sound? Towards Sonic Democracy University of the Arts Helsinki, funded by the Kone Foundation.

Alex Nevill

What does it mean to teach film in an art school context? 

Over the past two decades, practitioners working with film and moving image have increasingly traversed gallery and cinema contexts, with many established artists weaving together installation, short film and theatrical feature length works across multiple forms of exhibition. Alongside this, the pedagogy and environments for studying film practice have evolved with the proliferation of screens and democratisation of moving image and sound technologies. Responding to these developments, this paper asks what it means to teach film in the context of an art school today. Considering various aspects of curriculum design, it questions the balance of student’s technical and conceptual learning as well as the integration of interdisciplinary ideas, collaborative approaches and experimentation within practice-focused film courses. This paper explores these ideas by drawing on an international Master of Fine Arts degree in Film Art as a central case study. The curriculum for this new programme has developed over the past two years and will be jointly delivered between Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland and Paris College of Art in France

Writing in 1972 artist filmmaker Harun Farocki (2020) distinguished film pedagogy in art schools, which he likens to prototype workshops, from more industrial focused film schools which he compares to factory assembly lines. Through the lens of the MFA degree, this paper builds on Farocki’s idea to propose a research-focused ‘film lab’ study model across the two schools which prioritises experiential learning and a grounding in artistic research. This approach allows students to embrace uncertainty as a critical friend and build understandings rooted in the complex flux of interactions inherent in creative practice (Beard, 2022). Similarly, the research emphasis encourages students to find original routes and answers through their work while pursuing learning beyond the bounds of previous experience, personal knowledge, expectations and skill sets (Gauthier & Mazza, 2020).

References:
Beard, Colin. (2022) Experiential Learning Design: Theoretical Foundations and Effective Principles. New York: Routledge.

Dylan, Gauthier. & Mazza, Jen. (2020) “Like Driving at Night: A Process-Based, Learner Centred Approach to Teaching Artistic Research Across Disciplines.” In: Metus-Berr, Ruth. & Jochum, Richard. Teaching Artistic Research: Conversations Across Cultures. Berlin: DeGruyter.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110665215-005

Farocki, Harun. (2020) “Film Courses in Art Schools”. Grey Room, (79), pp.96–99.
https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00296

Bio

Dr. Alex Nevill is a filmmaker and lecturer at Edinburgh College of Art, The University of Edinburgh where he runs the BA (Hons) Film & Television degree. He recently led the development of an international MFA Film Art programme, which will be jointly delivered with Paris College of Art in France. He is the author of Towards a Philosophy of Cinematography (Palgrave, 2021) and his writing has appeared in the Journal of Artistic Research and the Journal of Media Practice.

Rosinda Casais

Common Interferences 

Common Interferences is a proposal emerging from the ongoing research project MINA, which investigates how artistic practices transform when sharing becomes a method rather than an outcome. Across previous encounters — Sharing the Game, Ongoing Beginnings, Subsequent Questions, Comment On, and Memory in Practice — we observed how practices are continuously shaped by subtle, often unnoticed forms of interference: spaces, objects, tools, rhythms, references, and presences that quietly redirect perception and action. These interferences are rarely named, yet they influence how artistic thinking emerges, how attention is distributed, and how teaching and learning unfold.

This presentation proposes to explore common interferences as a condition of artistic pedagogy — not as disruptions to be eliminated, but as forces that participate in making. By calling them “common,” we point to their shared, banal, and often silent nature: they are part of everyday artistic work, though seldom acknowledged in formal pedagogical settings. Rather than treating them as obstacles, we ask: What do these interferences enable? What do they shift? How do they shape the ways we perceive, decide, and relate within artistic processes?

The session will introduce a practice-based device developed specifically for the conference. We will work with overlooked elements of our artistic environments — a tool, a reference, a fragment, a routine, or a spatial detail — and observe how each one interferes with our gestures, choices, and forms of attention. Through short exercises, shared reflections, and collective mappings, we will examine how interferences circulate between us and how they generate orientation, deviation, or resonance.

Rather than aiming for clarity or definition, Common Interferences proposes a pedagogical space where artistic thinking can be perceived through the conditions that shape it. The session foregrounds the ethical and relational dimension of interference: recognising that artistic work is always interdependent, situated, and affected by more than intention.

Bio

Rosinda Casais (1981) is an artist, architect, and researcher based in Porto. Her work unfolds across artistic practice, art education, and collaborative research settings, exploring how practices are shaped by gestures of sharing, proximity, and attention. She holds degrees in Architecture and Sculpture from the University of Porto, where she is currently a doctoral researcher in Artistic Education as an FCT fellow. Her research, (TEIA) COMUM, investigates the relational and temporal dynamics of artistic practice, focusing on the in-between moments that open, redirect, or transform collective processes. Rosinda co-develops MINA, a collective project dedicated to enabling artistic sharing as a method of inquiry. Her work with MINA emphasises situated forms of knowledge, ethical responsiveness, and the subtle conditions that shape artistic thinking. She collaborates with diverse artistic, academic, and cultural contexts, creating spaces for reflection, experimentation, and relational learning.

Maryam Bagheri Nesami and Carol Brown

Whirling pedagogies /pedagogies of whirling 

If a practice is the embodiment of a concept, whirling situates corporeality in flux. Whereas animals in the wild instinctually narrow their senses in order to survive, contemporary artists, in captivity of disciplinary knowledge systems, do the opposite. Expanding perception, attuning to the world around us, whirling is both a reaching out and an inward fastening of a core, holding steady within a vertiginous world.

This lecture-performance invites reflection on whirling as pedagogy for a turbulent world. Underscored by our deep friendship and history of relations as student/teacher, researcher/supervisor, mentee/mentor, dancer/choreographer and now peers working at a distance, we step through the process of learning how to whirl, spin and turn on the spot and travelling, whilst speaking through our differential attunements to the practice. Maryam draws upon lineages of whirling within (and outside) sufism and Carol on the teachings of expressionist dancers for whom spinning and turning was a core technique. Re-turning to their joint practice as teachers and academic researchers from different hemispheres, they spiral in and out of words and worlds, articulating pluriversal becomings that refuse to settle.

Transformational and transgressive, teaching to whirl becomes teaching to unfurl, as proprioception and haptic senses enter into a state of vibrancy with aerial bloodstreams. This auto-theoretical (Lauren Fournier) experiment exceeds genre categories and disciplinary bounds. It flourishes in entanglements of intra-action (Karan Barad) between corporeal and incorporeal energetic fields and forces. As a pedagogy that teaches us ‘how to transgress’ (bell hooks), whirling reminds us that the other is ‘not just in one’s skin, in one’s bones, in one’s heart, in one’s nucleus, in one’s past and future’ (Barad 2007, 392-393). We invite pedagogy as processual matrixial unfurling a post-humanist dance in which cosmology and corporeality, student and teacher are mutually constitutive, and reciprocal becomings.

Bios

Maryam Bagheri Nesami is a dance writer, curator, and professor of artistic research based at Uniarts Helsinki’s Theatre Academy, where she began her appointment in May 2024. Originally from Iran and an underground community of dance, Maryam’s research and creative practice focus on questions of care/risk, non-violent resistance, inclusion, and the political/potential of choreography. As an independent artist she has worked across curating, dance writing, and embodiment practices, bringing together global collaborations and ethical approaches to curation.

Carol Brown is a dancer, choreographer and artist-scholar from Aotearoa New Zealand whose work has been presented globally. Her choreographic imagination is renowned for its transdisciplinary reach. Touring internationally and engaging in sustained collaborations, Carol has developed choreographic methodologies in dance-architecture, digital dance and site dance and has written extensively about this work in books and academic journals. Her research takes place in diverse settings including urban, architectural, virtual, theatrical and natural environments; and is catalyzed by questions of space, posthumanism, ecological change and hidden histories. She has held lecturing positions at the University of Surrey and Brighton University, was a Reader in Dance at Roehampton University and an Associate Professor in Choreography at the University of Auckland where she founded Choreographic Research Aotearoa. Currently Carol is the Head of Dance and Professor of Choreography at Victoria College of the Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne.

Chloe Lewis and Nicola Gunn

Invisible Courses 

Taking Italo Calvino’s 1972 novel “Invisible Cities” as its point of departure, this workshop invites participants into the co-creation of a speculative teaching manual for artistic thinking and creation.

Through 55 descriptions of fantastical, fictitious cities, Calvino’s novel reimagined the travel guide genre by positioning cities not as geographic locations but as metaphorical patterns for understanding fundamental life experiences such as desire, memory, and loss. In response, “Invisible Courses” seeks to reimagine the syllabus format by momentarily abandoning the temporal, rational, institutional, and economic parameters that typically frame the possibilities and potentials within teaching and learning.

Through a series of guided exercises based in writing, discussion, and game structures, the group will use Calvino’s imagined cities as prompts to collectively develop 55 imaginary course proposals that transcend the constraints of reality to articulate the diverse philosophical, political, and creative drives that fuel artistic pedagogies. Going beyond the singular voice offered in Calvino’s text, “Invisible Courses” offers a framework for a multiplicity of perspectives, opening possibilities for new directions in feminist and intersectional pedagogies in establishing the foundations of a pedagogical tool for teachers in the arts and beyond.

This project was developed within the framework of “Unsettling Hierarchies in Art Education,” a research group established in 2023 by Associate Professor Chloe Lewis at the University of Bergen’s Faculty of Art, Music and Design (KMD). The workshop will be led by Lewis in collaboration with Associate Professor Nicola Gunn and PhD candidate Lise Tovesdatter Skou, who are both active members of the “Unsettling Hierarchies” group at KMD.

Bios

Chloe Lewis is a Canadian visual artist, writer, and educator based in Bergen, Norway. She is Associate Professor of Sculpture and Head of Education at the University of Bergen’s Faculty of Art, Music and Design (KMD), where she established the research group “Unsettling Hierarchies in Art Education” in 2023 and was awarded the status of Outstanding Teaching Practitioner in 2024. Pedagogy is central to her current research and in recent years her teaching practice has extended to Sweden, Iceland, Netherlands, Poland, Estonia, Canada, and Ghana. As an artist, Lewis’ work takes shape as objects and artists’ books and is characterized by collaborative modes of expression. Within the frameworks of the artist duo Lewis & Taggart and the artistic platform MOLAF, her work has been presented widely in Europe and North America at venues such as Fonderie Darling, Montreal; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; and CCA, Warsaw. Her publications are held in the collections of MoMA, New York; Artexte, Montreal; and the National Library of Norway.

Nicola Gunn is an Australian artist based in Norway, where she is Associate Professor of Performance and Time-based Art at the University of Bergen’s Faculty of Art, Music and Design (KMD). Her artistic practice sits between contemporary performance, choreography, and text, with an ongoing interest in comedy and complicating the relationship between self, subject, and audience. Her work has been presented in 19 countries, and her recent artistic and pedagogic research encompasses the dramaturgy of translation and translation as reinvention, iteration and adaptation as a form, tourism, and the sensual stage.

Gunn is an active member of “Unsettling Hierarchies in Art Education” – a research group established at the University of Bergen in 2023 by Associate Professor Chloe Lewis.

Jana Unmuessig

Towards Embodied Teaching in Higher Arts Education 

My workshop explores how somatic therapies and body-aware pedagogical approaches can enrich teaching in higher art education by fostering presence and resilience. How might these practices help educators guide artists in ways that respond to the complexities of contemporary life? How can we as artist-pedagogues move beyond fear of therapeutic methods and embrace embodied strategies that support students’ artistic and existential questions: Who am I as an artist? How can I sustain my practice in a world consumed by conflict and cultural pressures?

Somatic approaches such as attunement, listening, and working with the polyvagal nervous system invite educators to rethink teaching as a relational, embodied process rather than a linear transmission of knowledge. These practices resonate with the idea of thinking as an activity without center—a concept from psychoanalytic traditions that aligns with what artists might call associative thinking. How can we, as pedagogues, next to our traditional training in discursive reasoning, cultivate associative thinking as a pedagogical tool that opens space for non-hierarchical, generative processes?

My hypothesis is that when art pedagogues allow these parameters to deeply inform their practice, they not only enhance their own presence but also transmit this embodied, tacit know-how to students. This workshop combines brief body awareness exercises with a lecture bits through which I flesh out the above-mentioned topics via an interdisciplinary framework, including, for instance, Leslie Dick, Roanna Mitchell, Steven Porges. It aims to open a conversation about how embodied pedagogies can sustain artistic life and offer new ways of teaching in times of uncertainty.

Bio

Jana Unmüßig is a Helsinki-based artist, pedagogue and intern in the somatic therapy of Marion Rosen (Rosen Method). She is teaching, mentoring and supervising since 2020 in the MA Choreography at Uniarts Helsinki. She has a long-term interest in expanded choreography pedagogy in higher art education which led her to discover radical and feminist pedagogies, in theory and practice. Jana received a Doctore of Arts from Uniarts Helsinki in 2018. Prior studies included theater at the Sorbonne-Nouvelle, paris, dance at Salyburg Experimental Academy of Dance (SEAD) and choreography at the Inter-University Center of Dance, Berlin (HZT).

Junuka Deshpande

A Knock on the Image: Addressing the anxiety of image-making and social fragmentation through self-reflexive practice in times of violently accelerated circuits of image generation and consumption

A Knock on the Image is an attempt to see beyond the image that is seen—to find out what makes a meaningful image, both for a maker and a reader, in our sociologically fragmented times, where we breathe easily available and consumable images that seem omnipresent and abundant

A rumination on two image-making studios that I facilitated with art and design undergraduate students—one that focused on mending the relationship between the self and the self, and another on the self and the world—my presentation observes a pedagogy of artistic thinking practice in the classroom through situated, reflexive, and reflective sense-making by young practitioners.

As one studio considers drawing as a primary form of self-expression and reflects on the idea of drawing a line as a mending practice—focusing on the self as context—the other considers photographs as documentary image-making, to explore one’s own gaze in a place to ‘frame’ the other. Both studios centre vulnerability and tension as key experiences in the process of making but they also hold the parts of the images together, in both drawing and photography.

I feel that an attempt to knock on the surface of the image scatters the fragments of the image into the air and reveals a range of processes that offer space to breathe, mend, and repair the experiences of fragmentedness within and outside, while the images that are created become the byproducts of this process.

Bio

I am an artist, singer and an educator, my practice is rooted in observation and shaped by drawing, sound, and material play as I explore affective, vulnerable dimensions of inner and outer worlds. With a background in documentary filmmaking, I critique representational hierarchies in the process of image-making through my work. I am a faculty member at Srishti Manipal, Bangalore, India. Academic Profile: https://srishtimanipalinstitute.in/teaching_faculty/junuka-deshpande/

Wantana Tancharoenpol

Artistic Thinking as Situated Praxis: Reconsidering Artist Pedagogy through Project Learn with the Legends 

As societies experience intensified inequality, fragmentation, and cultural uncertainty, the pedagogical practices through which artists are formed require renewed examination. This paper theorizes artist pedagogy and artistic thinking through a case study of Learn with the Legends (LWL), a Faculty of Education, Chulalongkorn University initiative that brings international artist–educators into sustained dialogue with emerging musicians. Rather than presenting LWL as a programmatic achievement, the study treats it as a conceptual site for interrogating how contemporary artist pedagogies cultivate embodied, tacit, situated, and relational forms of knowing that respond to shifting social and educational conditions.

Drawing on praxial music education, embodied cognition, and scholarship on artistic epistemologies, the paper argues that LWL advances an emergent model of artist pedagogy in which artistic thinking is not simply the acquisition of cognitive or technical skills but a situated practice of communal meaning-making. Through rehearsals, dialogic workshops, intercultural exchange, and mentor-based artistry, LWL highlights learning processes that emphasize deep listening, intuitive responsiveness, collective problem-solving, and the negotiation of artistic intentions. These practices challenge individualistic and hierarchical traditions of arts training by fostering cooperation, mutual respect, and shared authorship.

The paper situates LWL within broader transformations in higher arts education, where institutions are increasingly pressed to address polarization, inequity, and the erosion of communal life. LWL’s blend of traditional mentorship with student-centered co-creation, reflective critique, and intercultural mobility illustrates how artist-educators are reconfiguring their roles from transmitters of expertise to facilitators of socially responsive artistic engagement.

Ultimately, the study proposes that when conceptualized as situated praxis, artist pedagogy holds the capacity to cultivate artists who can contribute imaginatively and responsibly to uncertain futures. LWL thus serves as a generative lens for rethinking how artistic thinking emerges from and actively reshapes the pedagogical conditions of contemporary arts education.

Wantana Tancharoenpol holds a Master of Arts in Musicology from the Institute for Musicology and Media Studies at Humboldt University of Berlin (2020). His research focuses on musicology, nineteenth-century Western European art music, performance practice, and musical aesthetics. He has presented his work at several international conferences, including the 14th International Musicological and Interdisciplinary Conference of the Croatian Musicological Society, the International Academic Conference Opera in Musical Theater: History and Present Time (2019), the 15th International Congress on Musical Signification (2022), and Musical Sources: Past and Future, the international conference marking 70 years of RISM (2022).

Bio

Wantana is currently a lecturer in the Music Education Division, Faculty of Education, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, where he teaches music theory, ensemble studies, music pedagogy, and artistic research. In addition to his academic work, he serves as conductor of the CU Symphonic Band, contributing actively to Thailand’s contemporary wind ensemble culture and music education landscape.

Vincent Roumagnac

Re-Ecologising Art Thinking/Making/Sharing: Discipline Fluidity, Artistic-Research-as-Ecosystem, and Out of the Blue – Methodologies 

The paper proposes an expanded understanding of artist pedagogy through the interconnected concepts and dynamics of “discipline fluidity”, “artistic-research-as-ecosystem”, and the “Out of the Blue” methodology. Through examples of works carried out within my doctoral and postdoctoral projects, Reacclimating the Stage (2020) and Data Ocean Theatre (2025), it unfolds how these frameworks can support ways of art teaching and learning that remain sensitive to the complexities and uncertainties shaping contemporary art education. Discipline fluidity, as a non-binary and adaptable approach to knowledge and practice, enables artists, researchers – and therefore artist-researchers – to move beyond solidified and inherited disciplinary structures, creating space/time for inclusive, porous, and dynamic commons. This perspective encourages artist educators and students to work with knowledge in motion, to reconsider institutional boundaries, and to cultivate forms of learning that respond to the shifting conditions of artistic and societal life. It also challenges hierarchical and historically exclusionary structures by valuing situated, embodied, and relational modes of entangling art and research. Simultaneously, the concept of artistic-research-as-ecosystem provides a framework for understanding artistic practice and research as a re-ecologised environment in which art, research, and community are not separate pre-defined experiences but are constantly shapeshifting formations through mutual influence and reinvention. This symbiosis-oriented relationship enables alternative ways of thinking, making, and disseminating artistic research, where boundaries between research and practice vanish, leading to performative, collective, speculative, and hybrid aesthetico-epistemic situations. The Out of the Blue methodology further enriches this pedagogical landscape by integrating chance, serendipity, a sense of failing hospitality, and improvisation into research and teaching. It creates conditions in which unexpected events become generative, and where glitches, mistakes, or interruptions can lead to significant directions. Within this context, artistic thinking develops through a dynamic tension that is playfully rigorous, speculatively grounded, and reflectively intuitive, an oxymoronic constellation that characterises the emergence of knowledge in processes of art thinking, making, and sharing.

Bio

Vincent Roumagnac is a Basque-French artist based in Helsinki (Finland), and a visiting researcher at the University of the Arts of Helsinki. Initially a theatre actor and director, he moved away from “straight theatre” practices and modes of production, focusing instead on how theatricality evolves in response to climate urgency and technological advancements, within what he has coined a discipline-fluid methodology. His works blend visual, installation, and performing arts, with an emphasis on intervention and site-sensitive ecologies. In 2020, he completed a Doctorate of Arts at Uniarts Helsinki, with his artistic research project Reacclimating the Stage. In 2025, he publishes his post-doctoral research Data Ocean Theatre (2021-2024) and starts the new project Restaging Flower Power.

Annie Davey

Unwitting evidence of radical art pedagogies 

Amongst the exhibitions, publishing and events of the so-called educational turn was a tendency to look back through the archives of fine art education as a means to work through what was felt to be a crisis related to the neo liberalisation of higher education (Beck and Cornford, 2014; Madoff, 2009; Thorne, 2017). Progressive, critical and experimental models of the 1970s, in particular, were mobilised as touchstones to a more democratic and ‘radical’ past.

This presentation will explore alternative accounts of ‘radical’ artist teacher pedagogies via an idiosyncratic selection of documents produced in and through UK fine art education during the 1970s; a newspaper article from 1971, a sociological study from 1973 and a student satire from 1978. These documents reveal textures, atmospheres and experiences that did not surface amongst the projects of the educational turn, acting as unwitting evidence of a fine art education we might not want to return to. Moreover, I am interested in the affective resonance that these documents convey in providing tragic, comedic and generative glimpses into the complexities and choreographies of the art school. I will discuss my engagement with these documents through writing, practice and pedagogy and their potential to unfix a historiography of fine art education, as well as a horizon of thought regarding its future.

Bio

Annie Davey is a teacher, artist and researcher. Her work is often collaborative, exploring educational institutions and social and cultural histories. Projects include Puss and Mew: The Revival of an Eighteenth Century Gin Vending Machine, 2004-2012 with Luis Carvajal, Ways of [Machine] Seeing, 2021-ongoing, with schoolteachers and The Centre for the Study of the Networked Image, and The School of Fine Art as Sitcom, 2021-ongoing, with Jeffrey Charles Henry Peacock. She is currently Programme Leader of the MA Art Education, Culture and Practice at UCL Institute of Education in London.

Marja Nurminen

Desirable mixing of knowledge of artist-teachers and higher arts education researchers 

This postdoctoral research focuses on the gap between artist-teachers and the knowledge which arouses from higher arts education research (HAER). HAER is seldom part of the agenda for artists who teach at higher arts education. Their days are filled by teaching, and their scholarly interest lies in their art. In autumn 2015 a heated debate about artists’ education started in Sweden in an artist-driven net magazine Omkonst [About art]. In that debate, vice chancellors, professors, students, doctoral candidates, cultural writers and architects took part. 31000 people read the articles and the rejoinders to the articles. Although artist-teachers do not have time to acknowledge HAER, they show huge interest in higher arts education. Pedagogical training has become obligatory at all universities also at art universities. Books have been written where artist-teachers discuss teaching and learning in an art university. There are also doctoral theses about art education in different fields conducted by artist-teachers, in architecture, in photography, in fine art, and in drawing. In this research, I will use art works and texts by artists who comment higher arts education to find themes that are important for artists. Then I will couple these themes with higher arts education research. I will also interview artist-teachers together with their art works and discuss higher arts education from the point of view of the themes I have found in art works and texts. What are the themes that interest artists in artists’ education? Is there research about these themes? How do they differ from the themes of higher arts education researchers? During my doctoral thesis I developed particular stance of Alvesson’s “at-home methodology” called “at-home interviews”. The theoretical framework is Practice theory. One of my aims is to bring artists who work in higher arts education and higher arts education researchers closer to each other.

Bio

Marja Nurminen (b. 1967, Pori, Finland) is an artist, educator, researcher and Doctor of Arts. She works as a University Lecturer in Drawing and Painting at Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture. Her doctoral thesis was called The Teaching of drawing in higher arts education – Articulating the practitioners’ orientations. (2024). In her work, the value of drawing as a tool for thinking is central. She has had 19 solo exhibitions in Sweden and Finland. She has taken part in over 30 group exhibitions in Sweden, Finland, Spain, and Romania. Furthermore, she is represented at many art collections such as The Finnish State Art Collection, Public Art Agency, Sweden and the City of Gothenburg. Not only that, but she has made four public art works, three in Sweden and one in Finland.

Beatrice Catanzaro

Holding Complexity: Artist Pedagogies in Uncertain Times 

As Art Academies become increasingly international, educators face the challenge of balancing multiple—often conflicting—cultural, political, and geopolitical perspectives while attempting to establish shared understandings of terms such as Social Justice and Human Rights. Drawing on firsthand experience, we have repeatedly seen how assuming these concepts possess universal meaning produces reductive pedagogical approaches that overlook the diversity within classrooms. Such assumptions often generate friction (Tsing, 2005), polarisation, and diminished cohesion and inclusivity. Universalised notions rooted in Western epistemologies risk erasing contextual and experiential differences, creating what Wenger (1999) calls “a sense of common understanding that is neither situated nor participated.” This flattening of complexity not only limits learning environments but also restricts the development of nuanced, context-responsive artistic practices.

These conditions highlight the need for art pedagogies that actively recognise and value diverse cultural perspectives, biographies, and cosmologies. Such pedagogies must emerge from transdisciplinary approaches that help students navigate the structural and affective complexities of globalised education while strengthening their reflective capacities as emerging artists.

This paper is grounded in over a decade of collaboration between Claudia Pretto—jurist and trainer in human rights and the protection of trafficking victims—and Beatrice Catanzaro, socially engaged artist and educator with extensive experience in crisis regions such as Palestine. Together, they have developed methods that place human rights training in dialogue with embodied, imaginative, and dialogical artistic processes. This transdisciplinary approach has been applied across art academies, law faculties, and professional training programmes, demonstrating the significant contribution that art-based pedagogies can offer even in fields not traditionally associated with the arts.

Their findings suggest that preparing art students for contemporary complexities requires art academies to adopt transdisciplinary methods that intertwine legal knowledge with artistic thinking. Such approaches support students in globalised classrooms to unlearn simplistic interpretations of human rights and to cultivate nuanced, contextual, and critically engaged perspectives.

Bio

Beatrice Catanzaro, artist, researcher and lecturer. She gained her PhD at Oxford Brookes University (UK) with the Social Sculpture Research Unit. Her artistic practice is grounded in long-term, situated engagements and interdisciplinary collaborations. In 2010 (-ongoing), she co-founded Bait al Karama, a women’s centre and community art project in the Old City of Nablus, Palestine. Between 2012 and 2015, she taught at the International Academy of Art Palestine in Ramallah. Her art projects have been commissioned and exhibited internationally, including at the MART Museum (Rovereto, I), CCA Glasgow, Palazzo delle Esposizioni for the 16th Quadriennale di Roma, the Jerusalem Show by Al Ma’mal Foundation, the Land Art Mongolia Biennial, and the Qattan Foundation (Ramallah, PS). Recent text-based contributions include chapters in the Routledge Companion to Art in the Public Realm (Routledge, 2021), AS IF – A Lungomare Reader (Spector Books, 2023), the Handbook on Irregular Migration (Elgar, 2023). In Visible: Art as Policies for Care (NERO, 2024). She currently teaches at NABA Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti (Milan) and at UNIDEE Academy of Cittadellarte–Fondazione Pistoletto (Biella).

Kerstin Schroedinger and Moira Hille

Dreaming towards Sapphic School: On vocal Interspecies Connectivities 

At different times, both of us imagined founding a kind of sapphic school: a space for queer artistic learning with and from one another, where sapphic ways of being—guided by desire rather than discipline—and interspecies relations shape the curriculum.

In this lecture-demonstration, we draw on this imaginary by taking up sound and resonance as methods for practicing reciprocity and multilogue in learning. We experiment with the voice as an intentional, immediate, and situated form of knowledge production. Through our exchange of vocal messages, we explore multispecies pedagogies emerging from our relations with horses and cats. These non-human companions offer modes of interaction—co-regulation, refusal, rhythm, attunement—that challenge human-centred assumptions in art education and foreground embodied, responsive, and tacit forms of knowing. We describe this as “interspecies knowledge exchange,” expanding artistic learning toward relational ecologies grounded in mutuality rather than extraction.

Drawing on our intertwined practices as artists, researchers, teachers, and art therapists, we attend to the political and infrastructural conditions that shape learning. These voicings trace our shifts from students to teachers, showing teaching not as content delivery but as a dense relational field marked by precarity, visibility, and moments of reciprocity. Artist pedagogy becomes a space where normative knowledge hierarchies are unsettled and learning unfolds through shared presence, attention to the moment, and processes that cannot be predetermined.

The workshop invites participants to explore vocal address as a multispecies and political practice—one that resists acceleration and institutional abstraction, and instead cultivates learning grounded in shared agency and situated care. Through voice, resonance, and sonic attention, we open pathways toward a sapphic school in which humans and non-humans, artists and non-artists, teachers and learners co-create polyvocal structures capable of responding to unstable conditions—and reaching beyond what is conventionally understood as art.

Bios

Kerstin Schroedinger is an artist, filmmaker, researcher, and educator whose work examines the politics of images, historiography, and the conditions under which visual and sonic archives are produced. Working through moving image, sound, performance, and writing, she investigates how ideological structures shape perception and representation. Her projects often draw on archival research, critical feminist perspectives, and collaborative methodologies. She is currently university researcher at the Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki. 

Moira Hille studied fine arts and completed her PhD in Practice at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She has been teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna since 2009 and currently heads the MA programme in Critical Studies there. Her current research interests lie in the historical relationship between art and therapy and its impact on contemporary art education curricula.

Aino-Kaisa Koistinen and Susi Nousiainen

Writing-with-water as feminist artist pedagogy 

During the years 2023–2025, we developed the multimodal artistic research practice called writing-with-water. The idea was to explore how artistic thinking and artist pedagogy intersect in more-than-human writing experiments. The result is a more-than-human poetic inquiry of sorts, situated in the multi- and interdisciplinary field of writing as artistic research – or practice-based literary studies. We explored writing about water, by the water, with our memories of water and sensing our embodied waters, as well as concretely letting the water modify the paper we have written on. Engaging in this practice often left us surprised, with open-ended questions rather than answers.  

In our presentation, we reflect on the artistic thinking and learning practices that have emerged during our writing-with-water and offer suggestions on how other artist-researcher-pedagogues can, hopefully, learn from our practice, together with us. 

In addition to writing as artistic research, we situate our practice in the context of feminist posthumanism and new materialism (and hydrofeminism, specifically), feminist discussions on situated knowledges, and earlier artistic and poetic encounters with the more-than-human through writing. By doing so, we locate ourselves in the intertwined, multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary discussions on learning to relate differently with our planet, as part of it.   

Our practice is one suggestion on how artistic research can guide us to become sensitized with – and as part of – the more-than-human world. We do not consider our poetic experiments as something that we as artist-researcher-teachers should or can completely “own”. Instead, we want to invite others to try out our practice, develop it further, and maybe share some variation of it back to us. We believe that writing-with-water can open space for imagining and practicing more-than-human relationality in a sustainable manner, thriving for a more meaningful multispecies coexistence on the planetary level.   

Bios 

Aino-Kaisa Koistinen is a poet-researcher-teacher working with feminist practices of “writing-with” – writing that seeks to acknowledge how different human and more-than-human actors (co-authors, scientific and artistic traditions, texts, embodied histories, landscapes and environments) influence the artistic, poetic practice. Koistinen holds an MA in Literary Studies, a PhD in Contemporary Culture Studies, and the Title of Docent in Media Culture. Currently, they work as university researcher at the University of the Arts Helsinki Research Institute. 

Susi Mikael Nousiainen is a poet, visual artist and PhD researcher in Management Studies at the University of Lapland. His background is in Fine Arts (BA) and Literature (MA) and he has completed the study module in artist pedagogy at the University of Arts Helsinki. Nousiainen works with the theme of marginalized knowledge, practicing methodologies of arts-based and artistic research. His ongoing artistic-autoethnographic work discusses doing ballet differently from a queer perspective.

Marika Orenius

Rethinking Artist Pedagogy Through Enactivism 

This paper and discussion explore the relationship between fine art education, artistic thinking, and artistic research through the lens of enactivism, while simultaneously engaging participants in a creative, experiential practice. Grounded in the concept of experience, the session integrates theory and action by drawing on enactivism’s four interrelated dimensions: enactive, embodied, embedded, and extended. These concepts highlight how artistic practice and learning are always situated, relational, and socially meaningful processes, offering new pedagogical possibilities for interdisciplinary art-education environments.

The lecture portion begins by outlining the enactive dimension, emphasizing that artistic practice arises from a continuous interplay between doing and perceiving. Artists do not merely react to the world—they actively co-create it through situated action. This insight points to the importance of pedagogies that encourage experimentation, risk-taking, and the formation of dynamic world-relations. The embodied dimension further underscores that artistic thinking unfolds through bodily engagement with materials, spaces, and movements; it is a sensuous, corporeal mode of inquiry. Artistic research, therefore, becomes a method of making embodied knowledge visible and critically shareable.

Building on this, the dimension of embeddedness reveals how artistic work is always entangled with environments, communities, and societal power structures. This invites students and practitioners to question their own positions and responsibilities within the world. Finally, the extended dimension shows that artistic practice can exceed individual experience by fostering collective spaces where activist, transformative, and future-oriented potentials emerge.

Transitioning from theory to practice, the workshop invites participants to explore experience through drawing action and interaction. This performative and reflective session offers room for independent artistic thinking and making, guided by the four enactivist dimensions. In closing, we engage in a facilitated discussion about the drawings created and the experiential nature of what is felt, thought, or internally understood—linking theoretical insights to lived artistic processes.

Bio

Marika Orenius (Doctor of Arts) is an artist–researcher–teacher and a lecturer in artist pedagogy at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki. Her doctoral dissertation, Lived Spaces in the Artist’s Work and Fine Arts Education (Aalto University, 2019), examines the relationship between artistic practice and teaching, highlighting how visual arts education evolves as a philosophical and pedagogical field. Orenius’s artistic research brings together contemporary camera-based experience with philosophical and art-theoretical inquiry. She has published widely in artistic research and visual arts education and has participated actively in national and international research networks since the 2010s.

She holds an MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts (1999) and has also studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Valand Academy in Gothenburg. Her artistic work includes video and photographic installations, drawing, and performance, often addressing embodied experience, lived environments, and collective or relational dimensions of being in the world.

Pilvi Porkola

Performing public pedagogy  
Artist pedagogy and politics of performance 

In this presentation I explore the intersections of artist pedagogy and performance art through my performance project SOFA – Conversations on Utopias (2024). Drawing on Charles Garoian’s (1999) notion of performance art as a critical cultural practice, I examine how the performance can create space for discussions on care, democracy, activism, future urban planning as well as politics of art and art pedagogy.  

Moreover, I analyze a series of performative conversations held in Helsinki, contextualizing them as a ‘utopian practice’ that enables public pedagogy. I draw on utopian studies by exploring how performance can reach and stimulate social change, what it could be (Levitas 2014, Cooper 2014, Salmenniemi et al. 2026). By reflecting on the politics of pedagogy – institutional, global and personal – I focus on how performance can function as a critical site to think about the politics of art pedagogy. The presentation concludes with a reflection on how performance can work as utopian practice in the context of artist pedagogy.   

Cooper, D. (2014). Everyday Utopias: The conceptual life of promising spaces. Duke University Press. 

Garoian, C. R. (1999). Performing pedagogy: Toward an art of politics. State University of New York Press. 

Levitas, R. (2013). Utopia as method: The imaginary reconstitution of society. Palgrave Macmillan. 

Salmenniemi, S., Porkola, P., & Ylöstalo, H. (2026). Arkipäivän utopiat: Poliittinen mielikuvitus ja vaihtoehtoiset tulevaisuudet. Gaudeamus.  

Heidi Westerlund, Guadalupe López-Íñiguez and Tuulikki Laes (University of the Arts Helsinki)

Artist Pedagogy as Systems Praxis

Research in higher music education has long called for dismantling the disciplinary silos and institutional hierarchies within the music conservatory system. Yet, a broader systemic change remains slow. Drawing on ecological metaphors and systems thinking, this keynote challenges the enduring divides of both “practice without theory” and “theory without practice” to shift the understanding of (artistic) research and professional education in music (viz., artist pedagogy) towards a systems praxis. Such a reflexive reconceptualization necessitates and facilitates the interconnection of pedagogy, theory, and practice in the arts with relational and transformative systems change—inviting all music professionals to become critical systems practitioner

This keynote is supported by the following projects, funded by the Research Council of Finland: Performing the Political: Public Pedagogy in Higher Music Education [grant number: 355247]; The Politics of Care in the Professional Education of Children Gifted for Music [grant number: 348591]; and Transition Pathways Towards Gender Inclusion in the Changing Musical Landscapes of Nepal (AmplifyHer) [grant number: 358072].

Bios

Dr. Heidi Westerlund is a professor at the Sibelius Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki, Finland, and Adjunct Professor at Monash University, Australia. Her research has contributed to topics such as higher arts education, music professionalism, systems thinking, cultural diversity, and democracy in music education. She has been continuously developing a collaborative doctoral program and postdoctoral community at the Sibelius Academy, and has led several Research Council of Finland -funded research projects, of which the ongoing project is the “Transition Pathways Towards Gender Inclusion in the Changing Musical Landscapes of Nepal” (2023–2026).

Dr. Guadalupe López-Íñiguez is a Spanish musician and university researcher at the Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki. She holds a PhD in psychology and a master’s degree in cello performance. She is Honorary Senior Fellow (Music Psychology) at the University of Melbourne and Docent (Music Education) at the Sibelius Academy. Since 2009, she has led funded research projects on topics including constructivism and conceptual change, giftedness and talent, employability and careers, wellbeing, performance optimization, and theories of emotion and motivation. She has published widely and holds leadership roles in multiple organizations.

Dr. Tuulikki Laes is a university researcher at the University of the Arts Helsinki with a doctoral degree in music education. She holds a title of Docent (Musicology) at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Helsinki. Currently, she is appointed as the Academy Research Fellow by the Research Council of Finland (2023–2027). She has conducted several research projects focusing on democracy, inclusion, activism, social justice, policy, and systems thinking within higher music education and socially engaged music practices. She is co-chair of the ISME Commission for Policy: Culture, Education and Media and editor-in-chief of the Finnish Journal of Music Education.