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Robida Summer School; Tending Ruins
Topoló/Topolove
July 2026
alternative pedagogy, communal living, care&responsibility

Alternative Pedagogy
Communal Learning
Learning Forever
Common Dwelling
Ruins

“Robida’s main desire is to rethink the possibilities of cultural work in the post-rural areas, which were once kept alive by agricultural production but were left behind by their inhabitants in the process of modern urbanisation. The post-rural areas are not just a potential and necessary site of future cultural production but also an important influence on the content and form of its artistic projects: the rural environment offers a qualitatively different spatial and temporal experience, which translates into a manifold of sustainable and environmental conscious outcomes.
In its everyday life and practice, Robida works towards a future of common dwelling, an expansion of the concept of a resident to include in its definition also more-than-human inhabitants of Topolò and a deconstruction of some of the basic oppositions haunting modern ways of living: rural/urban, inside/outside, public/private, host/guest.“ - robida website

I had first found Robida through social media and was immediately drawn like a moth to their publishing practice and ephemera, the palpable intention of earnest collaboration and meaning-making/finding behind the many beautiful things they produce and organise. The door being cracked i then, ofcourse, was struck by landscape itself; Perched at the head of a mountain, shouldered by dense forrest, a cluster of old terracotta roof buildings scatter the shoulder beneath a tall church; steep inclines along cobblestones with weeds and small flowers stubbornly peaking through as you make the climb toward Izba; the restaurant, workshop space, library, bookshop, kitchen, dancehall, basketball court, unofficial town square. with only 25 remaining inhabitants of the village, privacy is a shared illusion, walking by open windows and gardens, greeted by the sounds of an intimate co-habitation, humand and more-than, everyone here is connected in myriad ways; we are invited as communal dwellers for weeklong semester, welcomed with warmth as temporary foreign teachers, students, friends, neighbours.

we awake to the cacophany of church bells ringing across the valley, permit me my obvious rural romanticism, i am merely human! Stunned by beauty! The isolation of this mountain village alongside the wild forrest that nips at its heels, feels bursting with a collaborative living, a kind of harmony that is rare to foster in bustling cities. If isolation brings its own difficulties Robida Collective seems intent on bridging the many cultural distances which can often stagnate or calcify a post-rural village, or really, any village or community.

I found the call out for Academy of the Margins quite late, maybe a few days before close. The mind began its self conscious spiralling(virgo), i never feel academically sanctioned enough; too rough around the edges, cutting my teeth in community work(margins) but equally bursting with thought and curiosity; reminded that institutional distrust is valid and what better way to learn than from those who studied within the systems, intent to then disseminate their knowledge along the margins. The largest pull was a dream the night before final call; in this dream everything glowed. In all sincerity i added my dream along with my application, with the argument that dreams are a valid teacher.

i was chosen to participate in the Academy of the Margins based on my application for a workshop called “Sounding the Ruin”; taking my experience running experimental sound workshops with young people and imagining it within a context of re-animating the ruins of the old terrace gardens, now crumbling walls of stone, littered across the ever climbing forrest.

Together we are invited to invesigate the ‘Tending the Ruin’ through a series of workshops, talks, listening, readings, discussions, field expereiments and shared meals. RUIN in all its conceptual perameters and possibilites, physical, societal, ecological. As the thick forrest makes ruinous the evidence of rural farming and the old stone buildings are left as remnants by the de-population of those seeking security in larger townships, here we are asked to remain close, to loving tend
and contend with what remains, what refuses our forgetting.

Kata Szász- Komlós

Club Garage(Anti-Gallery) Academy of the Margins (Tending Ruins) Flaschcards for a Redeeming Memory

Dió Dye Loch Doon

New Skin for Old Song

The Birth of the Moment Ebresztó Lend me your name Pillangó Pengetó Designs

About / CV.

Club Garage(Anti-Gallery)
Academy of the Margins (Tending Ruins)
Flaschcards for a Redeeming Memory

Dió Dye
Loch Doon

The Birth of the Moment
Ebresztó
Lend me your name
Pillangó Pengetó
Designs