Stitching Urban Landscape, Reconfiguring our Boundaries from Feminist Margins

This workshop explores how bodies move through Berlin’s layered temporalities, playing the audio-visual archive back through collage and montage —traditionally gendered labor — to reconfigure our personal and political limits.

In today’s day and age, new financial and political paradigms are reshaping the conditions of artistic production. These conditions are beset by austerity measures and restrictions. These same restrictions can configure new impulses for artistic production.  Specifically in the city of Berlin, which has experienced different urban reconstructions, how does the body move through its urban landscape, the palimpsest of stories, in a way that pays homage to these divisions while moving porously through them? Can this alternative movement create ways of thinking and being otherwise, in and outside of time, challenging the rule of the norm, surveillance structures past and present?

In this workshop seminar, we will meditate on artistic strategies to pay homage to past and present forms of being and moving through the world. Such strategies will center forms of reuse of media (playing the archive back), to creating video essays where the intimate self serves as a vessel to distribute the commons from image-commons, to image-multitudes, to under-commons and fugitive resistance from below. How can tools such as stitching, collage, and montage, labor historically attributed to women, inform our artistic forms of production to push back and assert our personal and political limits? What happens when we create new boundaries and scores for movement from the perspectives of our own corpus? The seminar will include close-reading sessions, visits to archives and excursions. The participants will develop sketches for projects along with the instruct in their chosen medium while using digital tools of recording, video montage, and archival traces.

Schedule

July 8-10 and July 13-15.

Prior application requirements

Participants should bring different media associated with their navigation of the city of Berlin. They will expand on this gathered media that could be archives, a sound recording, a drawing, or poem in the frame of the seminar.

Knowledge requirements

Some familiarity with video editing/recording is a plus but not required. Workshop participants can explore the themes of the seminar in the mediums of their choice, but audio-visual formats will be explored.

Equipment requirements

Personal device such as phone or external recording devices are recommended.

Vanessa Gravenor is an independent artist and researcher based in Berlin. She is an executive board member of the non-profit organisation art&dialogue, and previously held the position of an Associate Artistic Researcher at HFBK-Hamburg (2021–2024). As an artist, she uses autofiction as a method to mediate her exploration of audiovisual archives, using theories of vulnerability and gender to challenge ways of speaking of images at war. She creates films through site-specific research that respond to local histories with local community stories. She has held grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, DAAD, and NEUSTART Kultur. She has lectured at the University of the Arts Berlin; European Media Studies, University of Potsdam; and the University of the arts Hamburg. She has shown her work internationally in festivals and exhibitions: nGbk, Kunstraum Kreuzberg Berlin, DE; VISIO, Lo Schermo dell’arte, Florence, IT; Park Avenue Armory, NYC, USA; Alpha Nova & Galerie Futura, Berlin, DE; International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen (DE); VBKÖ Vienna, AT. Together with Prof. Dr. Hanne Loreck, she edited and conceptualized the experimental publication project Archives of the Body – The Body in Archiving, which was published online with the HFBK-Hamburg University Press. She is currently in the dissertation completion phase of her doctorate at HFBK-Hamburg, which will be defended in 2026.

www.vanessagravenor.com