Academy of Margins Summer School: Radio Gardening

Robida's Summer School of the Academy of Margins is a week of lectures, workshops, explorations of different micro-landscapes surrounding Topolò/Topolove (Udine), readings, walks, conviviality and collective learning about topics related to the environmental humanities and environmental care. 

The summer school will take place from 4 to 10 August 2025, in the village of Topolovo/Topolò.

For this 4th edition, the organisers have invited 15 participants through an open call to join them for the Academy of Margins Summer School on the topic of Radio Gardening—the term borrowed from radio artist and researcher Kate Donovan, who used it in 2018 for her Datscha Radio project, which explores the intersection of gardening and radio art, and which later became the title of a project by the artist Monaí de Paula Antunes—to rethink what radio can be, how it is made, what it does and how it creates movement between people and places.

On Sunday, 10 August, a day of public events will take place, featuring presentations by the participants of the summer school as well as other artists through film screenings, conversations, and musical interventions. More information available at the official website.

In this context, gardening is not simply a metaphor, but a methodology. The organisers draw inspiration from Kate Donovan’s conceptual parallel between radioing and gardening in her work Radio as Relation: "A radio can be cultivated in the same way as a garden: structures can be set in place to allow for ‘organic’ development, seeds can be sown, ground prepared, areas laid out, research made, pieces cut back or pruned, and there can be a sense of wonderment at how/which new—unfamiliar/ unplanned/ unexpected—seeds fly in on a breeze. […] The radio and the garden are similar in that they can both be considered as temporary networks; a garden is a complex inter-species network (with both parasitic and symbiotic tendencies) with trans-scalar effects, that is controlled (at least in theory), maintained and cultivated by humans—as is a technological radio network. Yet, we must admit that despite the often clear boundaries, both are also slippery figures in some aspects, and will always, to some extent, resist the hold of human control." (Kate Donovan, Radio as Relation. Listening across worlds of artistic research, technologies and the more-than-human. PhD Dissertation, Potsdam University, 2025.)

We ask ourselves what does it mean to tend to radio as one tends a garden? What does pruning mean in radio terms—what do we cut and why? What kinds of things might take root without our planning—and how do we stay open to them? How might we design radio structures that not only transmit but also pollinate—allowing ideas, voices, and relations to travel elsewhere, and take root in unexpected places? What if we understood radio not as a signal broadcast from one to many, but as a temporary, shifting network of relations—symbiotic, parasitic, collaborative?

The programme and concept of this year’s summer school is curated by Robida collective, and their close friend Jack Bardwell, who helped them establish Radio Robida in 2021. The Summer School on Radio Gardening will offer time and space to explore these questions together. As in previous editions, they have invited participants to apply to the Summer School by proposing activities, workshops, lectures, experiments, presentations, or discussion formats that explore the practice, theory, and politics of radio.

The Academy of Margins program is funded by Friuli - Venezia Giulia and the Government Office for Slovenians Abroad. This year's edition is part of the project Radio drugega / The Other Radio, included in the GO! 2025 official programme.