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NAFAE Conference 2026: Call for Papers

This year’s National Association for Fine Art Education conference ‘IT TAKES A VILLAGE TO RAISE AN ARTIST: LOCAL, TRANS-LOCAL, GLOBAL’ will take place at Champness Hall, Rochdale on Friday 24th April 2026.

The focus of the conference will be co-operation, conflicts and collective agency in defence of creative and cultural education and placemaking.

We welcome proposals on the following themes:

Space and Place

● How do we define ‘region’ in an era where administrative boundaries, cultural identities and economic geographies no longer align?

● In what ways do place-based practices, geographies and cultural infrastructures contribute to, or challenge, broader ideas of regional or national identity within the arts?

● What is the shape and place of the future campus?

Emerging needs and priorities

● What priority and emerging creative and cultural skills most effectively promote lifelong learning and learner agency?

● What will shape the form of the educational offer and curriculum for Fine and Visual Art practices in terms of pedagogies, adult education and co-operative learning?

● How important is accreditation (i.e. what are the freedoms/restrictions it imposes for students and curriculum planners?)

Partnership and co-operation

● What are the weighted contributions of investors and stakeholders supporting educational initiatives marked as alternative to establishment institutions?

● Who are the private providers of education and lifelong learning that can be trusted to deliver with integrity or in any way enhance the current landscape?

● How can resourcing and facilities be modelled to best enable sustained practices and relevant growth from the activity?

Local, Translocal and Global

● What are the international exemplars for co-operation and where are the potential allies that will help to secure a fairer and more resilient accessible Fine Art ecology?

● Art and art practices are a public and civic good and underpin global citizenship and belonging.

● Why, if we consider the concept of paideia, we have failed to convince decision-makers of the contribution that creative arts make?

You can find our more about the conference here.

Proposals for contributions should be submitted to: admin@nafae.org.uk no later than Friday 13 February 2026. Decisions on contributions for our next NAFAE conference will be communicated to the participants by 27 February 2026.

To submit a proposal for contributions, you must be a NAFAE member. To join NAFAE please visit the membership page.

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In Conversation with Eugene Shimalsky

My recent conversation with Eugene Shimalsky for his podcast ‘Garden.Something.Meeting’ is here. In our free-wheeling discussion we touch on a wide range of topics including our relationship to news media; the war in Ukraine; disinformation narratives; cognitive overload; potlatch*; critical theory; algorithmic polarisation; Nick Land (again!); the development of Neo-reaction; the cult of acceleration; propaganda, war and trauma; fear and the psychology of reality denial.

*I’d like to clarify some of the comments I made about ‘potlatch’ in our discussion. There are two distinct but related meanings of the term. The first is the ceremonial cultural system of the First Nations people of the Pacific Northwest that was prohibited by the colonial authorities between 1885-1951. The second is an avant-garde appropriation of the idea taken from ethnographic literature first articulated by Georges Bataille in The Accursed Share (1949). Bataille used it as an example of a non-utilitarian, ‘general economic’ model of wealth that had, theoretically, a revolutionary, anti-capitalist potential. This idea was taken up by the Lettrist International through their journal of that name. It is through Bataille that the term ‘potlatch’ became associated with violence, excess, transgression and ‘getting wasted’. This is however not a characteristic of traditional potlatch ceremonies, which are very sober and strictly regulated events.

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Documentation of VeveXXX at Fylkingen

Below is documenting of the VeveXXX event at Fylkingen Experimental Music and Art Space, Stockholm, Sweden on 1st March 2025. During the performance Roberto N Peyre and I produced a ritual floor drawing dedicated to the deified Greek hero Hyacinth and the revolutionary Haitian leaders who shared that name. The drawing was accompaniment by a new sound piece created by Jean-Louis Huhta (aka Dungeon Acid). This was followed by a performance and by Lisa Janbell & Camilla Sivam (aka Dos Oké) dedicated of the Yoruba deities Ogun and Ossain, with a new sound piece created Sofia Sainio (aka Sofftronic). The video was made by Roberto, who also curated the event. Photographic documentation is by Anna Druvnik, Jean-Louis Huhta and Isa Maxe-Winter.

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Drawing Analogies Book Launch and Discussion

We will be launching our book Drawing Analogies: Diagrams in Art, Theory and Practice at The Gallery, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT on Thursday May 1st at 18.00.

The launch will be accompanied by invited academics presenting on their research and discussing diagrams with the Diagram Research Group.

The invited academics are:

  • Dr. Winnie Soon, artist & Director of UG Art & Technology (Slade School of Fine Art UCL
  • Duncan Greig, Professor of Genetics (Centre of Life’s Origins and Evolution/CLOE)
  • Martin Holbraad, Professor of Anthropology (UCL Anthropology)

Drawing Analogies is published by Bloomsbury Press as part of the ‘Drawing In’ series as a hardback book and open access publication that can be downloaded here.

There will be refreshments. For information and attendance e-mail David Burrows: d.burrows@ucl.ac.uk

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This is Not a Diagram: Applying General Semantics to Contemporary Arts Pedagogy

I’m genuinely honoured to be giving my paper ‘This Is Not a Diagram: Applying General Semantics to Contemporary Arts Pedagogy’ at the forthcoming online symposium of the Institute of General Semantics – Communication, Consciousness, and Culture II – on Saturday 19th April. The event is free and open to all but registration is required.

For those not familiar with the discipline of General Semantics, this is the perfect opportunity to learn about it. There is an incredible line up of speakers and it promises to be a very special event.

My panel – ‘Map and Territory’ – will run from 12.30 – 13.45 pm GMT.

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VEVE XXX at Fylkingen

I will be making a new ritual floor drawing with my co-creator Roberto N. Peyre at the experimental arts and music venue Fylkingen in Stockholm next Saturday, March 1st. The performance will be accompanied by an immersive 8 channel sound piece by Copenhagen-based electro acoustic composer and sound artist Jean-Louis Huhta (aka Dungeon Acid). We will be joined by Stockholm-based performance duo Dos Oké and Stockholm-based sound artist and DJ Sofia Sainio (aka Sofftronic) for an evening of ceremony, revelry and dancing. You can find out more about the event and buy tickets here.

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NAFAE Annual Conference 2025 Call for Papers

This year’s National Association of Fine Art Education conference – Culture Co-operative: Moments, Spaces, and Alternatives for Art and Cultures of Learning – will be hosted by the Feral Art School in Hull on Friday April 25th.

The themes of this conference follow on from those of the 2024 NAFAE Conference The Art of Resistance and the arguments of the recent book Cooperative Education, Politics, and Art: Creative, Critical, and Community Resistance to Corporate Higher Education.

The deadline for proposals is March 3rd and confirmation on the 17th. More details about the conference themes and the submission process can be found here.