The Pirate Academy is an experimental meeting point aimed at creative research practices and methods, as well as for figuring processes of co-learning. It draws upon pirate culture and practices as a guide for mobilizing a range of inquiries and interventions, and for squatting the arena of knowledge production central to artistic research. If, as Steven Connor poses, knowledge acts as the governing economic, technological, and cultural material and means today, what types of anti-hegemonic practices can be crafted from within the institution of knowledge itself, that of the Academy? Are there counter-narratives to be configured, that might queer knowledge production as a production all-too-readily instrumentalized in the service of the next funding application? The Pirate Academy is an open source academy bringing together an intentionally diverse assemblage of perspectives and practices, supporting speculative, transversal, wilding and inoperative approaches.
The Pirate Academy was held once a month at the Bergen Art Academy through the academic year of 2021-2022 and staged as a Research Party over three nights. Including invited artists, scholars, activists, cooks and commoners, The Pirate Academy is understood less as a ship and more as a fog spreading its diffuse and intoxicating vapors.