Documenta

Pedagogies of the orchard

 

This issue of Documenta reflects on the changing ways in which artistic practices encounter, produce, and transmit knowledge. At a moment when established forms of education and knowledge production are being questioned, what does it mean to learn through artistic practice? Where does learning take place, and who or what can become a teacher?

 

Rather than approaching learning solely through the structures of formal education, this issue looks at the many ways artistic practices can become sites of inquiry, exchange, and transformation. Learning can happen through making, observing, listening, touching, caring, experimenting, failing, collaborating, or spending time with a place. It can emerge through encounters with other people, but also with plants, animals, materials, landscapes, technologies, archives, and forms of knowledge that exist outside institutional frameworks. These encounters can also become spaces of mutual exchange, where the experiences and knowledge of those involved actively shape artistic processes rather than simply becoming their subject or material.

 

We are particularly interested in how the performing arts and other embodied practices can open up forms of knowledge that cannot be separated from the body, its surroundings, and its relationships. From an ecofeminist perspective, this also raises questions about whose knowledge is recognised, how knowledge is valued, and what happens when we attend to forms of knowing shaped by care, interdependence, and situated experience.

 

We are particularly interested in how land-based practices and the knowledge of those who live and work in these places can enter into dialogue with artistic creation and mediation. Farming, gardening, and other forms of working with land involve knowledge developed through observation, adaptation, and labour. Here, the Countryside is understood not as a fixed or nostalgic space, but as a complex and changing terrain shaped by human’s hands, migration, extraction, technology, climate change, and global economies. We are interested in artistic and pedagogical practices that engage with these transformations and with the different forms of knowledge that emerge from them. 

 

We are interested in practices that challenge the distinction between learning and making, between research and practice, and between those who produce relational practices of knowledge production. How might artistic practices create conditions for forms of knowledge that are embodied, situated, relational, ecological, or otherwise difficult to capture within conventional structures?

 

Keywords

Performing Arts / Pedagogies / Artistic Research / Ecofeminism / Land-Based Practices / Countryside

Bibliography

Cluitmans, Laurie. On the Necessity of Gardening: An ABC of Art, Botany and Cultivation. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2021.

Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning. “Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning.” Accessed September 18, 2026. https://www.dechinta.ca/.

Estés, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. London: Ebury Publishing, 2008.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th anniversary ed. New York: Continuum, 2000.

Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994.

 

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall, and J. Rissler. Hospicing Modernity: Facing Social and Ecological Breakdown. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2020.

Kunstinstituut Melly. Tools for Collective Learning: The Name Change Initiative of Kunstinstituut Melly, Formerly Known as the Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art. Amsterdam: Jap Sam Books, 2022.

Latour, Bruno. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017.

Murphy, Michelle. “Alterlife and Decolonial Chemical Relations.” In Making Kin Not Population, edited by Adele E. Clarke and Donna Haraway, 2027. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Ostendorf-Rodríguez, Yasmine. Let’s Become Fungal! Mycelium Teachings and the Arts. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2023.

 

Timing

Proposals: November 1, 2026 at 23:59 (Brussels time).

First Drafts: March 1, 2027 

Second Drafts: June 1, 2027 

Publication: September 2027

 

Submission Formats

 

Articles and essays
Written contributions addressing artistic practice from a research perspective. These contributions will be published as A1.2 publications. We are looking for in-depth research articles of approximately 7,000  words. The writing can take different forms. Contributions may be playful and narrative, nevertheless maintaining Documenta’s academic requirements: articles still need to function as academic publications, with the appropriate bibliography and references. For this edition, we accept contributions in English or Dutch.

 

Artistic portfolios (Fully commissioned and remunerated for this issue)
These are image-based contributions that present artistic work through a visual portfolio format in a more experimental way. The portfolio section allows for distinctive layouts and typographic approaches. For this edition, the artist pages and portfolio contributions have already been commissioned by 

 the programme of educational development projects at KASK & Conservatorium. They consist of a selection of art students' reports produced as part of the experimental pedagogical project Glass-House and Soft Stones: Explorations on Grafting and Pruning as Epistemological Tools for Pedagogical Transformation at KASK & Conservatorium. These contributions will form a distinct portfolio section within the publication, with layouts and typographies that differ from the article and essay section.

 

General guidelines for proposals 

Proposals will be accepted by email: email it directly to the edition’s editor, Laura Palau, Laura.PalauBarreda@UGent.be 

 

Proposals should not exceed one A4 page (approximately 300 words), include your surname in the file name of the document you send and include a short biography (approximately 100 words).

By submitting a proposal, you confirm that the proposed article is original and has not been published or submitted elsewhere. Nevertheless, the article can build on previous research, presentations, or publications, such as your doctoral thesis or dissertation, but the submitted text should be new and original. 

 

We encourage you not to contaminate your text with AI, and not to feed the AI with your wonderful creativity, we also acknowledge that this usage requires water resources of other territories; to this end we ask you to be mindful with our surroundings but also with the far away surroundings. 

 

General guidelines for submissions (first drafts)

 

Final submissions should be submitted directly on Documenta’s 

website: https://documenta.ugent.be/submissions/

 

Before submitting a proposal, we encourage you to visit our website (https://documenta.ugent.be/site/richtlijnen/) and familiarise yourself with the journal’s citation style (Chicago style).

 

Final drafts should contain the following: title, abstract, main text, endnotes, bibliography

 

Submissions should not exceed the 7000-word count, notes and bibliography excluded

 

Submission of images and other visual material is welcome. It will be the author’s responsibility to obtain permission for copyright and to use the material in print. Authors may find further information on permissions and copyright here: https://documenta.ugent.be/about/submissions

 

The first step upon receipt of the paper will be a preliminary review by our editorial board committee. If the paper passes this stage, it will be sent for peer review. Documenta currently enjoys an A1.2 status and is VABB-listed. In recent years, there has been a shift in focus as we are increasingly working – not to say exclusively – with thematic focuses. These special issues are entrusted to guest editors who are responsible for recruiting articles, contacting the authors, and providing all the necessary materials. At Documenta, the peer review system is an integral part of the submission and evaluation process. The system of double-blind peer review ensures that published research is rigorous and meets the international standards set by each discipline. We engage in a collaborative refereeing process, which ensures that the work submitted is evaluated by and commented upon by two independent referees selected by the editors based on their areas of expertise. The editors will make the final decision about publication or assess the need for further revision. Feedback is then shared with the author. However, the reviewer’s name is not disclosed.

 

 

 

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