INLAND Academy participants field visit to Palestine, hosted by Hussam Ghosheh , May 2024.
Inland Academy is Inland´s learning space where our main fields of interest and accumulated experience take the form of an independent postgraduate programme. It offers tools, theoretical bases, and expertise to define and develop projects that examine and reinvent power dynamics around rurality and conventional contemporary art, bringing together academic and vernacular knowledge through cultural and agroecological praxis. Inland Academy opens a possibility for critical learning and mutual support for action in the face of eco-social crises, in a blended format.
This new course of the Inland Academy will run from September 2024 to June 2025, using a dual methodology incorporating both theory and practice. It takes Inland’s ongoing initiatives and spaces of agroecological and cultural practice as an expanded campus, as well as its connection to different projects and established art institutions, approaching the students’ potential from a holistic mentoring perspective. Inland has bases in Madrid, Mallorca, and Northern Spain, is part of the different networks such as Lumbung ( born in Documenta Fifteen) , the Confederacy of Villages, Transforming Territories and the World Alliance of Nomadic and Mobile Indigenous Peoples. These contexts work as living labs to access vernacular and a-scientific knowledge, re-establishing forms of value for theoretical frames, action-research, and extension methodologies, constituting a background to create new sustainable spaces for life, applied composed knowledges, and advanced artistic practices.
This program stands from a multidisciplinar paradigm to draw collectively new paths for land-based artistic and research practices. The need of alternatives that respond to the environmental crisis and the territorial unbalance between the rural and the urban world, the understanding of the obsolescence of inherited globalized art system logics ; in addition to the potential embedded in the exchange of multiple knowledges, constitute the base of the body of research and practice that has lead the activity of INLAND-Campo Adentro for almost 15 years, which we systematized now in this postgraduate programme, aiming to share the knowledge and experience achieved and to continue thinking and making, feet in the ground.
Supported by:
Objectives and competences
Inland Academy is a project that aspires to build a creative critical mass willing to question existing power dynamics around the rural and the contemporary art; to bring closer the academy and the rural, through creative operations and to create a propitious space for social action and innovation linked with the environmental and social challenges of our society.
Along the course the participants will develop competences such as interpersonal and collective work, technical competences for interdisciplinar analytical and critical thinking, participatory action-research, socioecological context appraisal, all project stages such as design, assessment, implementation and evaluation, forms of communication, artistic languages for creation and exhibition; and specific competences connected to land-based practices and crafts, ecological economy, cultural management and community engagement.
For whom
Inland Academy postgraduate program is addressed to a diversity of profiles in terms of educational and experience background and aspirations: students from both humanities and social sciences, scientists, artists, curators, theorists, shepherds, researchers, farmers, activists, educators, etc., interested in exploring through collective learning the converging points between rurality, cultural strategies, art and social transformation.
It is oriented to those with a pre-conceived context to engage with or a project that could benefit from the tutoring and guidance towards its better definition and practical steps for its implementation, considering as well and its socioecological sustainability and economical feasibility. But also to those others with an interest in these questions without an specific project in mind that could gain experience engaging with the on-going agroecological and artistic projects that Inland is carrying , with local and international projection.
No age or previous education requirements are held. The selection is based on the knowledge, experience and intent, and its adequacy with the main lines of the program. The group diversity and coherence will be attempted in this process.
Professional orientation
The aim of the Inland Academy is that the participants develop the critical tools needed in order to tackle from an innovative and creative perspective some of the most relevant social problems of our time, such as the climate crisis, interspecies coexistence, progressive social formations of care, contesting inherited center-periphery power dynamics and hierarchies, and testing the usefulness of art in diverse contexts, or territorial balance. Inland Academy is a unique program aiming at a learning, reflection, and social transformation space located at the intersection of rural culture and art and agro-ecology, therefore this postgraduate offers valuable tools for a broad range of vital and professional developments. It is specially oriented to those who look at the land as space for situating their practice, with primacy of the rural and the primary sector.