Short Abstract

A hands-on workshop using collage and stitching to explore non-linear time and more-than-now futures. Participants will be invited to create multilayered visual works and stitched poems that embody temporal entanglements and express speculative possibilities.

Description

This hands-on, collaborative workshop format functions as a laboratory for exploring futures imagination. Through the practice of collaging, stitching, and narrative methods, participants explore the subject of time as layered, entangled, and more-than-now.

STS has challenged linear progress narratives by asking how “things could be otherwise.” In the spirit of the conference theme, we approach collage, stitching, and storytelling as tools for engaging with multiple temporalities.

Fragments of the past (images, textures, words), gestures performed in the present (cutting, arranging, stitching), and orientations toward desired futures (speculation, symbolism, improvisation) become woven into the “now.”

The workshop begins with brief provocations on collage and stitching as methods for reconfiguring time as practices of care and repair.

Drawing on art-based approaches and feminist approaches, we consider how these practices create a space for collective creativity, reflection, and dialogue about possible futures. How might material agency foreground the more-than-human entanglements?

Participants then create their own “time-collages”: multilayered compositions that weave together images, textures, and thread. Those inclined toward text may craft stitched poems that interlace different temporal fragments. Throughout the process, participants are invited to reflect on transitions and possible futures in times of uncertainty. They ask: What futures are being stitched into being? How do materials help us imagine otherwise?

The workshop will conclude with a display of the works which will open up a discussion on the role of creative methods within STS futures-making.