To bind anew: this is an act of love.

This hands-on workshop invites participants to explore personal and institutional visual archives through working with alternative archival methodologies that center care, creativity, and collective healing. Using visual storytelling, sensory memory, and objects of personal significance—such as heirlooms, flowers, and memorabilia—we will investigate how archival materials can be reactivated as tools for reflection, recovery, and reimagining. By emphasizing participatory approaches and post-custodial archival thinking, this workshop encourages attendees to consider archives not as static repositories of the past, but as living, evolving spaces that can support restorative narratives and foster communal memory work.

Together, we will look at poetry, literature, art, and photography. We will restitch, paint, pick flowers, tear things up. We will reimagine, reshare, release and hold on to our archives. In addition to engaging with stories and photographs from our own archives, we will also contribute to a collective archive of our shared experience and wisdom. Participants will have the option to also have their archival (re)creations digitized. 

Open for all skill levels and individuals wanting to engage with their professional, personal or familial photographic archives.

Participants please come prepared with: printed reproductions of archival photographs to work with (all colors, shapes and sizes welcome). Additionally, we encourage bringing additional archival materials outside of the photograph: letters, journals, notes, memorabilia, scraps (reproductions preferable).

Materials : paint, tape, scissors, pens, and extra paper. Please feel free to bring your own supplies if you have them.

Instructors: Jenny Jacklin Stratton & Sarah Blesener (in partnership with Tacet Eye)
Date: Sat, Oct 4, 10am – 3pm (bring your own lunch)
Maximum capacity: 12
Minimum capacity: 5
Cost: $250+ $20 lab fee (includes basic materials + supplies)