(Re)Making Modernism Workshops

Participants are invited to join a collective making experiment in modernist material praxis, collaboratively reworking found objects and materials into new, strange forms to reflect on the role of sustainability in modernist scholarship and pedagogy. We invite participants to scour their surroundings before or during the conference to collect trash, keep train tickets, repurpose notes, gather odds and ends, and bring everyday objects to the session to use as art materials. The session invites participants to explore the reflective and embodied practices of modernism’s multimedia forms through an act of cultural re-making. Furthermore, we invite participants to explore the connection of modernist found objects, collage, assemblages and readymades with contemporary practices and pedagogies also anchored in the uncanny aesthetics of waste and reuse.Our workshop emphasizes the ways modernist waste-picking and (re)making recovered the eccentric, magical, and weird art, environments, and communities often discarded to the margins of canonical modernism. Following the hands-on portion of the workshop, the co-facilitators will lead a discussion reflecting on how the principles of slowness, fluidity, and plurality inherent to the models of modernist handiwork and craft (see: Elkins, 2022) and media production (small presses, little magazines, pamphlets, etc.) offer reuse and recycling as a weird intervention that lets us encounter the everyday in new ways. 

Attendees participated in a collective book arts experiment in modernist material praxis, collaboratively producing collaged pages which were then bound into a book that stands as a manifesto of sustainability in modernist scholarship and pedagogy. Beginning with an introduction to modernism, sustainability, and craft, Diana Proenza and Jade French invited participants to connect modernist found materials, collage, and readymade poetry with contemporary practices and pedagogies also anchored in the geopolitics and aesthetics of waste and reuse, like reparative design, visible mending, or the Latin American labor/environmental justice movement of binding books from recycled cardboard (cartonera publishing). Following the hands-on portion of the workshop, the co-facilitators led a discussion reflecting on how the workshop centered principles of sustainability, accessibility, collaboration, and reuse within, as a legacy of, and beyond modernist making.