Critical Environments: PASS Intensive Residency

This course is designed to support practice-based researchers including PhD students, museum and archive professionals, artists and others in all areas and disciplines of Art Studies, by deepening and strengthening their research methods and practices, and their understandings of the field's emergent and hybrid spheres of activity.

The forces of the Earth seem to have forever permeated the socio-political spheres within which so-called modern societies have so potently operated till recently. We are suddenly finding ourselves exposed with the fragility of the Earth and at the same time exposed to an intrusion of earthly forces we cannot control. This acute situation, which can be seen as a crisis of imagination, calls for altered sensibilities, revived rituals and other ways of instituting and archiving in this situation, which might not even constitute a polis in the way Euro-American politics understands it. This Intensive Residency invites participants to examine and share how art and other creative practices can respond to e.g. climate change, biodiversity destruction, the effects of extractivism, and dramatically altered living conditions caused by what among other things has been named ‘The Intrusion of Gaia’.

In support of the Earth being the actual protagonist of the course, the residency will take place on the west coast of Jutland in a landscape that bears a series of relevant historical features and exposes several of the current conflicts and tensions, which is the focal point of the course. An anthropogenic landscape that simply would not exist without 200 years of continuous human intervention through coastal engineering. Characterized today by intensive agriculture, extensive areas with solar panels, some of the world’s largest wind turbines and until ultimo 2026 large scale production of agrochemicals, the area is continuously being shaped by a number of global actors and capital interests. The course will be actively situated in this landscape.

Knowledge-producing practices in the arts are multivalent, and applicants are therefore invited to present their research in a variety of forms, ranging e. g. from academic presentation to performative approaches.

Target group

The course target group is practice-based researchers in the field of art studies.

This course will create a significant network and cohort of researchers and PhD students at the increasingly important intersection of different practices in art studies, supporting them to co-create its future methods, meanings and modes. Twelve participants will be selected to share their current research for feedback, and the residency format will allow for extensive informal exchanges for all.

Aims of the course

The wider field of Art Studies encompasses many practice-based researchers whose methods vary wildly and yet also intersect. Doctoral students and their peers in this field effect their research in universities, libraries, archives, museums, art studios and other practice-based contexts, deploying mixed and emergent methods often from a singular position and at times isolated from one another. This course aims to bring them together in purposive and valuable ways.

The PASS Intensive Residency offers practical research methods training delivered with hands-on pedagogical approaches including professional and peer-to-peer workshops. The programme distills PASS's practice-based activities into a five-day course with space for practice presentations and feedback. The residency is rooted in PASS's Research Platform and designed to support and articulate deep understandings of significant areas of study across our communities.

Skills acquisition in practice-based research methodologies and applied art studies knowledge production, developed in collaborations between academics, museum and archive professionals, artists, and other significant researchers.

Skills acquisition in identification of emergent methods; in recognising and supporting epistemic equity; and in interdisciplinary and inter-institutional collaborations.

Development of inclusive and exploratory critical thinking skills across widely divergent modes of practice and presentation skills for the expanded field of art studies.

Wider theoretical contextualisation of these methods in terms of bridge-building between academics, museum and archive researchers, artist researchers and others with a view to strengthening art's role and functions as a vital resource for a democratic society.