International Seminar on Art and Pedagogies. A Porous Academy: Critical and Performative Pedagogies at the Margins of the Institution.

A Porous Academy: Critical and Performative Pedagogies at the Margins of the Institution is an international seminar that seeks to foster critical reflection on artistic and performative pedagogies emerging at the margins of educational and cultural institutions, approaching these spaces as porous territories shaped by tensions, affects, and practices that exceed the official curriculum. Drawing on Fred Moten and Stefano Harney's understanding of study as a relational practice, together with bell hooks' notion of the margin as a space of radical openness, the seminar explores forms of learning, unlearning, and research that develop within institutional interstices: conversations, collective experiences, conflicts, archival practices, and processes of collaborative creation.

The seminar aims to open conversations around a series of questions that we believe urgently require renewed consideration: What forms does education take within artistic and institutional contexts, and what tensions, limitations, and challenges does it face? What kinds of interventions into institutional structures can critical pedagogies generate? How does performativity shape processes of teaching and learning? Which bodies are recognised, legitimised, or marginalised by the academy? What questions must we necessarily address today? What is—and what should be—the value of knowledge today? What new methodologies and ways of working can we imagine or experiment with? Which genealogies should we revisit? Which artistic-educational practices produce memory beyond the audiovisual documentation of their own processes? Is education institutionalised within the museum, or is it the institution itself that becomes (re)educated?

The seminar is organised around four thematic panels:

Panel 1. [Re]Defining the School

This panel proposes understanding the school as an open and inhabitable space in which care, affect, and relationships occupy a central role. It explores how institutional margins and "micro-fractures" can generate alternative forms of learning and collective knowledge, challenging the Eurocentric structures that have historically excluded certain histories, knowledges, and experiences.

Panel 2. Debates Between Art and Education Today

This panel examines the transformations brought about by the pedagogical turn within contemporary art and culture. It also reflects on the frequently secondary role assigned to education within cultural institutions and proposes a critical reconsideration of mediation and artistic practice as dialogical forms of knowledge production.

Panel 3. Methodological Approaches at the Margins of the Institution

This panel invites participants to reconsider methodologies of knowledge production both within and from institutional contexts. It explores situated, temporary, mutable, border-crossing, and even "useless" modes of practice. It also addresses the urgent questions raised by contemporary conditions of overproduction and distraction, while examining possibilities for challenging productivity as the organising principle of academic capitalism.

Panel 4. Archive and Education

This panel focuses on the relationships between archives, memory, and educational practices. It begins from the premise of a possible historiographical gap surrounding artistic-educational practices: What is preserved? What is lost? What remains outside the archive? Which genealogies inform our work? Contributors are invited to reflect on ways of documenting and archiving educational processes, the kinds of materials these practices produce—particularly audiovisual materials—and the implications of their absence or documentary fragility.

Submission Guidelines

The call is open to Master's and doctoral students, researchers, artists, educators, mediators, and anyone interested in sharing theoretical or artistic research related to the themes outlined above. We welcome contributions that interrogate our relationship to knowledge and learning, as well as practices of collective production and their performative dimensions.

We invite 20-minute proposals for either: academic papers; performances; short workshops; or other experimental formats of equivalent duration. Proposals may be submitted in Spanish or English by 31 July 2026. Applicants should submit one proposal only by email to: francesca.rendauam.es and cdesileucm.es.

Each proposal should include:
Author's name and email address
Title
Abstract (250 words)
Up to five keywords
Indication of the panel to which the proposal is addressed
Short biographical note (100–150 words)

Scientific Committee
Francesca Renda, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Claudia Desile Abraham, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Olga Fernández López, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Juan Albarrán Diego, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Iñaki Estella Noriega, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Pablo Martínez, Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Organisation

The seminar is organised by the Department of Art History and Theory at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid within the framework of the research project "PERCUR Performance and Curating: Performative Transformations of Curating, Collecting, and Spectatorship from a Comparative Perspective: Spain, Portugal, Argentina, and Brazil, 2003-2028", in collaboration with the Department of Art History at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid within the framework of the project "Atlas AV: The Audiovisualization of Art History between the Museum and the Academy".