Repeating with a Difference: Tracing as a Counter-Archival Practice

In Person  |  Workshops

Drawing is a task of observation, mark-making, and composition that allows us to understand the world from an embodied perspective. In this workshop led by multidisciplinary artist Francisco-Fernando Granados, participants are invited to explore the medium as an expanded practice in the making of embodied cultural histories. Together with Granados, participants will engage in multidisciplinary experiments with images, movement, and words that aim to open up the possibilities of tracing as a relational instrument with which to engage (and build) archives.

Tracing might be thought of as a counter-archival tool that can connect moments of keen insight with experiences that resist the structures of language. It transcends boundaries of institutional belonging and can enable multidirectional community connections. Tracing may entail the articulation of particular social/political/cultural formations, the timely telling of memories when the present urgently echoes the past, or the careful contouring of what cannot yet be known. The hand may tremble as it traces. It lingers in the spaces around judgement, making room for doubt and slippage as entry points for dialogue, seeking to use the space of the aesthetic in service of equitable futures that must be affirmed, even as they remain unpredictable.

This program is the first of three in a series of artist-led workshops informed by C Magazine’s Experiments in Criticism Facilitator’s Guide, which was developed in 2019 in consultation with experts in critical art pedagogy. These workshops pose critical questions for contemplation and discussion and propose approaches to alternative archival practices that are rooted in community rather than established by an institution.

This program is co-created and co-presented with C Magazine. Please contact info@cmagazine.com with any accessibility requests.

Image credit: Francisco-Fernando Granados