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Paper short abstract:

Historiography and speculative futures collide in my Covid Collage Chronicles series, an “ars-combinatoria” chronicle and diary of the Covid 19 pandemic. Dissemination led to a “patchwork” through learning appropriation, disjunction and juxtaposition as resistance tactics for therapy and repair.

Paper long abstract:

Historiography and speculative futures collide in my Covid Collage Chronicles series , a visual anthropology “ars-combinatoria” chronicle and diary of the Covid 19 pandemic consisting of four hundred collages made between May 2020 and August 2022. Collage is a way of entering, messing around with and thinking through absurdity, when we need recovery in a “time with no answers”. Michael Taussig shares experiments with collectives coping with the ‘age of meltdown’ and ‘dark surrealism’, by relaying Indigenous myth as metaphor: ‘Don’t think of this as “over there” and “back then”, as something exotically primitive. Instead stitch it into your current views and make a collage and see how you feel about your “normal” (Taussig, 2019, my italics). Justin Smith seeks authentic narrative: ‘Blackness aesthetically exists in a collaged state....Collage is a form of time-keeping, time-coding, time-capsuling our creative lineages along an amplified spectrum’ (in Henderson, 2021). Because the collagist appropriates from available material culture, they can enhance hidden aspects, undercut dominant portrayals, point to untruths and assumptions and create imaginary lore. I point to use of appropriation, disjunction and juxtaposition as resistance tactics and the work of solidarity, building community and repairing relationships. Robert O’Meally’s notion that ‘Selves and communities are collages and this improvisation is collaborative as quilters using cloth patches’ is inspired by Michel de Montaigne’s notion that ‘we are all patchwork....All cut from a single piece of cloth’ (2002). My background involves cloth and for this paper I concentrate on those collages using patchwork-like technique.