Archival Grounds: Collage Workshop
AltaHeirloom + Perennial Memory Lab present Archival Grounds: Collage Workshop
Through the practice of collage, participants are encouraged to consider this creative methodology as a pathway to memory-work and imagination. Collage can push back on existing hierarchies of information, lend textured materials to deep curiosity, and find new ways to subjects through experimentation and play. Facilitators Cienna Benn and Kennedy Arnette will introduce a discussion about their experiences with the preservation and stewardship of archives and land through the recurring practice and framework of collage to offer unique lessons in care, resistance, and sovereignty.
Facilitators will guide students in a hands-on mixed material collage practice composed of selected personal family archives, photographs and natural materials from Altadena landscapes, and selected poetry from the “Black Nature” anthology in celebration of Black History Month and the community preservation taken on by the AltaHeirloom project. Each participant will create one personal collage each, to then be scanned and digitally designed into a collective assemblage following the workshop. Participants will receive take-home material to inform a continuing collage practice, memory work, and land acknowledgement.
Kennedy Arnette is an archival worldbuilder, interactive designer, and communal educator who embraces placemaking as a form of ethical coalition building. Using culturally intuitive strategies, Kennedy works to support Black people and the historically dispossessed as we recover our legacies to live in greater relationship with change. Born and raised (primarily) in Los Angeles, themes of housing justice, food sovereignty, and self-determination inform Kennedy’s unique archival practice. The founding of Perennial Memory Lab is an extension of this grassroots pedagogy for new-world histories.
Cienna Benn a writer, archival practitioner and artist from Altadena, CA. Through her work, she cares for Black aesthetic sensibilities by lifting the collections of radical visual artists and art movements. Inspired by matters of identity and image-making, her practice considers the complexities of migration and intergenerational memory expressed through collective cultural work, photography, oral history, and vernacular archives. She stewards AltaHeirloom, a grassroots, digital collection of surviving archives from Black homes in Altadena.
This event was supported by the Teaching, Learning, and Campus Life Committee & Co-Sponsored by the Cultural Engagement Center and Pitzer College Art Galleries.