How do emerging artists learn to work across disciplines? And what does it take to turn interdisciplinarity from a desirable idea into an actual working condition?

Since 2021, Marginal’s Open Practice Society (OPS) has tested different ways of answering these questions. Across successive editions, the programme experimented with mentorship, collaborative production, intensive workshops, peer learning and collective artistic processes, involving participants at different stages of their professional development.

This research report looks back at that accumulated experience as a way of identifying what happened when different programme architectures were put into practice. It examines how collaboration, mentorship, duration, autonomy, and shared working time impacted participants’ interaction and learning.

One of the most powerful findings is that collaboration does not happen simply because people are placed in the same room. It has to be designed into the structure of the programme. Formats based on shared responsibility and concrete production generated stronger interaction, negotiation and experiential learning than approaches centred primarily on lectures or individual mentorship. The report also examines the tension between experimentation and continuity: while OPS has developed an emerging alumni network and generated substantial methodological knowledge, these relationships have not yet consistently become a sustained community of practice.

The report identifies recurring structural gaps and proposes a set of methodological principles for future development: interdisciplinarity needs to be learned through practice; mentors can be more effective as embedded collaborators than distant experts; intensive shared time can matter more than nominal programme length; autonomy requires structure; and continuity needs to be designed rather than assumed.

The report is part of Marginal’s ongoing effort to treat its own programmes as sites of research. We search for what can be learned from practice, what should be kept, what should be abandoned, and how experimental programmes can become durable infrastructures for knowledge, collaboration and public exchange.