Colonized, commodified, and reshaped by market forces, the palimpsestic female body is a site where cultural phenomenology and social perversions have historically been inscribed.

Images are powerful—they shape, distort, liberate. Yet images can be manipulated as much as they can manipulate. As so, assemblage can function as a form of resistance, engagement, dialog. Through the appropriation of complicit media text, this workshop takes a look at how the poetic language of collage can be used to subvert overt representations, reclaim the gaze, reverse the narrative and usher in more fluid, inclusive expressions of identity. With the maelstrom of archival material in circulation at our disposal, this workshop examines the semiotic representation of gender and sexuality within the postmodern feminist framework of fragmentation.

Through stripping away visual forms of representation, new constructions that go beyond the objectification, exploitation and hyper-sexualization created and challenged. From this reconfiguration of media text, new meanings and readings of gender, sexuality, and identity are defined that speak to strength and power.

The workshop aspired to impress how much perception is shaped by context and how creative expression is hinged on the smart implementation and articulation of both.