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Lecture Performance
What role can art play in political activism?
Free admission, no booking required, in English
Alessandra Pomarico, curator and author, and Nikolai Oleynikov, artist, discuss artists' involvement in the fight against Porsche's track expansion, which would have destroyed an ancient forest in Apulia. Drawing on their decade-long experience at Free Home University (Salento, Italy), they will share insights into tools, methods, and praxis emerging from the pedagogical-artistic experiment, where research, art, and activism merge with the everyday life of communities of practice and struggle.
How can we, through cohabitation, embodiment, co-sensing, and sense-making, hold spaces of learning, unlearning, and uplearning? How to organize and weave our resistance?
Alessandra Pomarico (PhD) is an independent curator, writer, educator, and organizer working at the intersection of arts, pedagogy, and community building. Co-founder of Free Home University, an artistic-pedagogical experiment, and trans-local network Ecoversities Alliance. Currently, she focuses on the ecologies of knowledge, relational epistemologies, and how we can learn from Indigenous ways of knowing. Recent projects include M.E.D.U.S.E (Mediterranean Ecofeminist, Decolonial Union for Self-Education), The New Alphabet School #Commoning (HKW Berlin) and #Healing (Dakar), What Is the Sound of the Border (England). Editor of the books Pedagogies Otherwise (2018), What’s there to Learn (2018) and When the Roots Start Moving: Resonating with Zapatismo (2021). Recipient of the XI Italian Council Fellowship, Alessandra is a lecturer at the University of Art and Design Linz, for the programme Art As Social Practice (Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts) and at the Academy of Fine Arts, Bari.
Nikolai Oleynikov is a fermented artist, a distilled punk and evergreen antifascist; recently, a refugee, he is a member of Chto Delat and of Arkady Kots Band; co-founder and mentor at Chto Delat School of Engaged Art; co-curator of Free Home University; part of the FireFly Frequencies radio, author of Sex of the Oppressed (2013-2024), co-editor of When the Roots Start Moving. Resonating with Zapatismo (2021). He teaches at NABA (Academy of Fine Arts), Rome.
Free Home University (FHU) was founded in 2014 in Salento, Italy. It emerged as an initiative of local and international artists, thinkers, educators, and curators aiming to explore alternative forms of learning and communal living. FHU is a pedagogical and artistic experiment grounded in collective experience, self-organization, and coalition-based learning methods, engaging with local communities in struggles, such as LGBTQI+ groups, displaced people, and land activists. Rooted in a non-hierarchical, energy-liberating, and insurgent ethos, FHU fosters an environment of coalitional learning and solidarity.
