Sam Jacob: On Collage – Workshop

Collage Workshop
Saturday 7 February
11.00–16.00
8 Smart’s Place, London, WC2B 5LW

This workshop takes us back. It takes us into a mythical place: Superstudio’s collage chest, which is now part of Drawing Matter’s collection. The workshop is an archaeology of Pop-architecture, a way to look closely at Superstudio’s material and sources, and at the media landscape they were both co-opting and objecting to.

During the workshop, we will be opening up the collage chest and rifling through its drawers that contain the magazines used by the radical Italian collective to make their legendary collages. We will use reproductions of this material, in conjunction with other Drawing Matter drawings, to make our own physical collages—an anachronistic method, using scissors and glue, in a digital age. This will allow us to engage creatively with visual culture of the past and the present. By the end of the session, we will have made a set of new images—of what, who knows… the collages Superstudio never made?

The workshop is a speculative reenactment. The equivalent of writing with Shakespeare’s quill, typing on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s typewriter, or dancing in Margot Fonteyn’s tutu. In part a reenactment, a way of inhabiting cultural ghosts and feeling strange sensations that emerge in this kind of proximity to the past. As they used to say on Stars in Their Eyes: ‘Tonight, Matthew, I’m going to be Superstudio’. – Sam Jacob

All workshop proceeds go towards materials and paying workshop facilitators. A schedule for the day will be sent to ticket holders ahead of the workshop.

Drawing Matter’s public programme offers the public opportunities to experience our drawings collection, which is usually only open to researchers by appointment and for student/practice workshops. Events take the form of talks at the archive, workshops by practitioners and open weekends.

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