CONSTRUCTED IDENTITY WORKSHOP — E. VB Print & Design

Etta Voorsanger-Brill is a Risograph Researcher, Lecturer and Designer based in East London. E. VB Print & Design encompasses Etta’s research, centering Risograph printing as a method to create collective imagination. The studio focuses on using Risography as an anti-capitalist, queer and alternative method for building connection.

OXFORD BROOKES UNIVERSITY, 2023

In a two-day workshop Art and Design Foundation students examined the notion of identity through a Foucauldian lens. The intention of the workshop was to question the purpose of holding on to an identity which may itself be transient. Over the two sessions the students made a series of collages which acted as non-figurative self-portraits. The collages were created, destroyed and remade, over and over until they were left with an amorphous representation of themselves. Collage served as a perfect medium to facilitate these conversations because the act of engaging with looking, cutting and glueing depends on the nature of the other images on the page, therefore the students were encountering how to operate in tandem with images already in flux. Their work came to embody what Foucault calls, ‘differentiation, of creation, of innovation.’