Online workshop as part of the event series Archiving Presents by DESKTOP ARCHIVES
Do you ever feel like the objects around you are trying to tell you something? Little stories, whispers of encouragement, reminders, messages maybe? Please join artist Elisabeth Smolarz for a one-hour virtual workshop How to listen to objects – a journey.
You will need:
- Pen and paper.
- Your pandemic object. (The object which came to you during the lock down and stabilized you)
- Your feminist object. (The object which reminds you of the history of feminism and your place within it)
- Your most important object. (The object that you could never part with)
Smolarz will lead you through a series of exercises of visualization and analysis in order to enhance your innate intuitive ability to communicate with objects. The workshop is informed by Smolarz’s multi-year publishing and photographic project “The Encyclopedia of Things” (2014-ongoing), where the artist has been investigating how objects are inscribed with meaning. This workshop is part of the weeklong programming of Desktop Archives, an online publishing initiative that examines how the pandemic has changed thinking around proximity, relationality, conversation, and the archival tools themselves.
You can find Smolarz’s portraits of transitional, pandemic objects in Issue 2 on: https://desktoparchives.info/Elisabeth-Smolarz-Issue-2
Elisabeth Smolarz is an artist, curator and educator based in New York. She was born in Poland and emigrated to Germany as a teenager. She was raised between two cultures affected by communist and democratic systems, before moving yet again to the liberal democracy of the US, where she creates photography, video, and social interactions investigating how consciousness, perception, identity, and value are formed by one’s cultural milieu.
https://www.smolarz.com/
The workshop is part of ARCHIVING PRESENTS, a weeklong presentation at alpha nova & galerie futura.
More about the event series here