CAPIm Summer School

CAPIm Summer School 2026 – Studies for a Potential History
June 28–July 6, 2026 | Marseille, France

The 2026 edition of the CAPIm Summer School gathers artists, curators, architects, and artistic researchers in Marseille to explore the political imaginary through Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s notion of potential history. Using SHED’s publishing catalogue as a point of departure, the program invites participants to collectively unlearn imperialism and consider how artistic research can repair and reimagine shared worlds.

Over nine days, the Summer School hosts workshops with invited artists and theorists—including Azoulay—alongside participant presentations, close readings, collective meals, and a public evening program curated by Arthur Eskenazi. Rooted in Marseille’s complex histories of migration, extraction, and empire, the gathering unfolds in close collaboration with local cultural structures such as Artagon Marseille and SHED Publishing.

Free and held in English, the program covers travel, accommodation, mid-day meals, and materials. Fourteen participants will be selected through an application process open until January 10, 2026. Apply here.

Senior Guest Researchers Fall 2025: Jonas Staal

Staal is an artist whose work deals with the relation between art, democracy, and propaganda. He is the founder of the artistic and political organization New World Summit (2012–ongoing). Together with Florian Malzacher he co-directs the training camp Training for the Future (2018-ongoing), and with human rights lawyer Jan Fermon he initiated the collective action lawsuit Collectivize Facebook (2020-ongoing). With writer and lawyer Radha D’Souza he founded the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (2021-ongoing) and with Laure Prouvost he is co-administrator of the Obscure Union.

Liv Bugge

Bugge is an artist whose practice explores how societal mechanisms are internalized, shaping normative ethics and dichotomies such as life and non-life, human and nature. Grounded in queer and feminist perspectives, her work employs sculpture, moving image, and installation. Bugge studied at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and the Higher Institute for Fine Arts in Belgium, completing her PhD The Other Wild: Touching Art as Confrontation at Oslo National Academy of the Arts in 2019, where she is now Professor of Fine Art. From 2012 to 2020, she co-ran the platform FRANK with artist Sille Storihle.

Studio Practice: On Affordances

Gothenburg, 27-29 April
Emerging from the ongoing collaboration between Stefano Harney, Professor of Transversal Aesthetics at KHM Cologne, and Dr. Valentina Desideri, a Researcher at CAPIm, this course considers the relation between affordances and study, as well as their relationship to study and the organization of the senses.

For Desideri and Harney, the basic premise is that study is a way to attune to affordances, and affordances are a way to think about our being outside of ‘inter-personal relations’. Rather than naming a relation between two bodies, affordances constitute the very shifting surfaces of what might be called “body” and thus allow us to think without relations. Immersed in a field of offerings (existing, possible, and virtual ones), we may think about study as a practice of tuning in with affordances, of sensing the yet unattended offerings that may host ways of existing that would not be thinkable or possible otherwise.

Facilitated by: Stefano Harney and Valentina Desideri

Event: The First Annual CAPIm Symposium

The first Annual Symposium of CAPIm took place on 28-29 August 2025 with a diverse range of contributions. This included Maria Galindo’s celebratory and performative keynote and her final sharp provocation from the floor, with regard to colonial dispossession: “You cannot give back the land so you can at least give up your ’concepts’!” Throughout the two days there was a lively exchange of projects, perspectives and questions that interrogated constructions of the political, the imaginary, and the meaning of different organizational strategies and ‘prefiguration’. Jonas Staal and Liv Bugge, the two senior guest researchers joining CAPIm, introduced their current research agendas to be developed over the next few months at CAPIm.

Keynotes: María Galindo and Stefan Jonsson.

The symposium marked the release of CAPIm’s inaugural Annual Report (2024).

Welcome to CAPIm

The Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary is committed to interdisciplinary practice and research in the meeting between contemporary art and the future of politics. Based at two institutions of higher education in art: HDK-Valand and Kungl. Konsthögskolan, the Centre’s aim is to facilitate connections between research and education through an engagement with experimental approaches. It is the first Swedish Centre of Excellence in the field of Artistic Research.

The activities of the Centre are organised around four conceptual strands guiding the construction of innovative educational and research frameworks. Climate Imaginaries engage with radical ecological change and environmental futures. Historical Imaginaries addresses decolonial approaches to collective memory and nationalist representations, as well as non-aligned movements and intensifying globalisation. Democratic Imaginaries takes its point of departure from the polarisation of the public sphere and emerging forms of illiberalism. Technological Imaginaries is focused on the interactions between art and technological developments and their resulting projections of possible futures.

The Centre is co-chaired by Prof. Mick Wilson and Prof. Natasha Marie Llorens, who together with Prof. Jyoti Mistry and Dr. Axel Andersson form its steering committee.

liv-bugge-umbilical-fire-2025-_photo-kristoffer-archetti-stolen — Liv Bugge, Umbilical Fire, 2025. Photo: Kristoffer Archetti Stølen.

The Pedagogical Programme

CAPIm’s activities are designed to nourish the curriculum of the PhD program at HDK-Valand and in the MA program at KKH. CAPIm also provides national and international access to educational opportunities informed by the latest developments in artistic research and the study of political imaginaries. Some courses are designed specifically by CAPIm faculty and guest researchers, while others are affiliated based on thematic overlap.

kerstin-bergendal-rotvalta-forestallning-photo-patrick-damstedt — Rotvälta / Föreställning, an artistic research project in public art led by artist Kerstin Bergendal. Photo Patrick Damstedt.

Artistic Research

CAPIm functions as an infrastructure to support new research initiatives and aggregate existing research in the field. Associated research consists of both projects led and executed by CAPIm staff and collaborations with those external to its core faculty.

panel_disc_ab_symposium_25 — Advisory Board panel during CAPIm’s Annual Research Symposium 2025, featuring Maria Hlavajova, Stefan Jonsson, Tania El Khoury, and Jay Pather.

CAPIm Advisory Board