In full bloom – a conversation between Angela Jerardi and Giulia Bellinetti in the gardens of Jan van Eyck Academy

What does it mean to make a garden a site for ecological practice, pedagogy and labor within the context of an art institution? What experiences, aesthetics and frictions emerge through gardening?

This episode takes us to the gardens of the artist residency of the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, where our guest, teacher, researcher, and writer Angela Jerardi is invited to be in conversation with the head of the Nature Research department and coordinator of Future Materials of the Jan van Eyck Academy, and PhD researcher at ASCA, Giulia Bellinetti.

In a courtyard where branches overgrow steel structures, and ivy foliage softens their voices, and dampens their footsteps, Angela and Giulia speak on how they have moved their teaching, research and writing into gardens and land practices. Walking between pumpkins, bamboo, and compost, they reflect on the questions, labor and hardships that have maintained their care work. How is seasonal time or lived time affected by the demands of institutional time? How can we attune ourselves to the pace and divergence of lived time of species? Speaking on strategies that art institutions employ to bring forth topics of ecology, land and climate, they reflect on how concepts and verbs can become increasingly metaphorical and rhetorical in art discourses. Walking in fall leading into winter, they move towards the edges of the garden where transformative questions have taken root, for you to anticipate their full bloom.

This episode is in two parts.

In the first part, departing from the soil, Angela and Giulia unpack how a garden affects and takes shape in each of their practices, and what this means in the context of an art institution.

After the break, their conversation leads them into the glass house of the garden where their conversation spans strategies that artists, communities and art institutions employ, and the relationships that emerge through them.

Part One (00:00 – 37:10) and Part Two (37:55 – 1:31:00).

Take a breath and tune into the warm autumn breeze and whispering leaves on their walk in these gardens.

How do we work with research within our educational programs? Which methods do we need and use? And what does this mean for BA and MA students?

In the podcast series Research in Art Education, Fabiola Camuti interviews students, researchers, teachers, and managers working in university of the arts to discuss the importance, challenges, and possibilities of conducting research within arts academies.

The KUO (national art education sector) Strategic Plan 2021-2025 identifies ‘research’ as one of the three key areas art universities should focus on in the coming years. Research is essential not only to the arts and professional art education, but also to our relationship with the world and society. Research already takes on an important role within universities of the arts, however, practices and ideas on the role, methods, ways of conducting research and its embedment within each and every institution, still leave space for further development, investigation, and actions to be taken.

For this reason, starting 2022, a national ‘Research in Education working group’ works together to strengthen the knowledge ecosystem and the research culture within our academies. This podcast series is connected to the events organized by the working group around the question: how can we make research sustainable in our academies? The podcast is sponsored by the Vereniging Hogescholen and hosted by Radio ArtEZ for Studium Generale.

The second episode of the series, titled, The Circle of Doing Research: a tool for art students, addresses the possibilities and mechanisms of this model, created by teachers-researchers of the Research Station of the Willem de Kooning Academy (WdKA), with and for the educational departments.

Joining the conversation are the developers of the circle, Miriam Rasch, philosopher, writer, and coordinator of the Research Station at the WdKA, Jojanneke Gijsen, researcher, art historian, and art educational developer, and Harma Staal, graphic designer and educational developer.

The Circle of Doing Research

Links:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/harmastaal

https://www.wdka.nl/stories/zoom-in-fifteen-film-portraits-of-graduates-2020-2021

https://www.wdka.nl/research/the-circle-of-doing-research#:~:text=With%20these%20questions%20the%20Willem,and%20to%20reflect%20on%20research.

https://www.miriamrasch.nl/