My Personal Retrotopia: Working with Memory in a 4-Day Photo Workshop

#photography #design

This workshop is designed for anyone interested in combining photography with themes of memory, identity, history, and time. A variety of assignments will guide you in discovering and telling your personal stories through photography, and create your own photo series.

Using Zygmunt Bauman's concept of "Retrotopia" as a foundation, we will explore how personal memories can be creatively reinterpreted through photography.

The 4-day workshop blends hands-on photography with photo analysis and discussions around theory. In addition to creating your own photo series, you'll develop skills in analyzing, reading, and discussing photographs. You will be encouraged to explore your personal history through images, capturing the essence of memories that shape your identity. We will look at the work of a number of contemporary and historical artists, and throughout the course, a variety of assignments will guide you in discovering and telling your personal stories through photography.

Collaborative exercises between participants, along with short writing assignments, will enhance the creative process. We will also examine the work of contemporary photographers who explore memory, offering fresh perspectives on how the past can inspire new visual narratives.

Together, we will address aesthetic, practical, and conceptual questions, such as: How does memory shape our identity? How can we visually represent the passage of time? How can photography help us reinterpret the past? By the end of the workshop, participants will have developed a cohesive photo series, blending the personal with the universal, and learned how to use photography as a tool for storytelling and self-exploration.

Knowledge requirements

No photographic experience is needed

Equipment requirements

Each student will need to bring a digital camera or phone camera to every meeting. Please also bring paper and pen to be able to take notes etc.

Carla Åhlander is a Swedish-Italian artist based in Berlin. She mainly works with photography and deals with themes like personal memory and history, as well as spatial structures in society. The immediate situations Åhlander documents in her photographs are often subtle appearances of power relations and systems of order – in all shades and from the vocabulary of everyday life – situations where something is about to happen or could happen, taken from a multiple of contexts, often with no beginning or end in narrative terms. Her solo presentations include Holding Places, Belmacz, London (2024), Geister, Scotty Enterprise, Berlin (2021), and Noteringar: tillstånd, platser, Fotogalleriet Format, Malmö, (2014). Schwartzkopffstraße in Berlin. Group exhibitions include You do not leave traces of your presence, just of your acts, Künstler:innenhaus Bremen (2024), The Art of the Palliative Turn, Bauhaus Museum, Dessau, (2024), Pelle d'oca, Villa Vertua Masolo, Milano (2019). Carla Åhlander is teaching photography at the Universität der Künste, Berlin since 2021 and at Bard College Berlin since 2019.

 

https://carlaahlander.com/