ACCESS // EXCESS (2026
Collage, Assemblage and Montage as exploratory practice and access to violence in documentary media
TEACHING
SYNOPSIS
This seminar concerns itself with documentary photographs and images that deal with violence — and with the access they seem to promise. That access is never simply given. What reaches and has reached us depends — at all times — on relations of power, on who was in a position to photograph or create, and on what was allowed to circulate afterwards and under what conditions. Whatever we are granted access to exceeds what any image can hold — and this is precisely what makes the images necessary. Within the seminar we focus on massacres, genocide, the violence of war, structural annihilation as well as quieter forms of violence. Three questions guide this course: Under what relations of power is an image made (access)? Under what conditions is it granted credibility (trust)? And what does an image ask of us in return for what it shows (witnessing)?
The seminar moves historically, from early documentary projects of film and photography through the four photographs taken from inside Auschwitz-Birkenau to images circulating on social media today. Its method is collage, and in one of its forms, mapping. Neither is a way of visualising an argument; both are ways of asking a questions. Following Scotti and Chilton, the work proceeds by taking apart and putting back together: fragments are set in relation, gaps are made visible, and the construction stays contestable rather than resolved. The process is neither simply active nor simply passive — it is determined and determining at once. Over the second half of the term, each participant develops such a work on a subject of their own within the field of the seminar, by hand or as an interactive web piece, built up over a sequence of stages from the first gathering of fragments to a finished, readable construction.
Four of the works are shown here, two made by hand and two as interactive web pieces. One spreads the global coffee trade across a deck of cards — labour, addiction, colonial history, advertising — that each viewer sorts anew, so no two readings of the subject are alike. Another cuts and layers press coverage of sexualised violence into a single dense surface, its flaps opening and closing to ask how reporting can make such violence visible without turning it into spectacle. A third, coded from scratch, lays out the pharmaceutical industry and its pricing of drugs for rare diseases as an investigative pinboard, drawing threads between fragments until a structure of quiet, systemic violence becomes legible. The fourth turns the decision of whether to have a child into a labyrinth, walked fragment by fragment, where the pressures bearing on that choice take spatial form. None of the four resolves into a final picture; each hands the ordering, and the gaps, to whoever comes to it.