Workshop Cut/paste: Visual Poetry with Frida Häggström-Gerdt

This workshop takes text as its starting point, its material and inspiration. It invites you to collect fragments from unexpected sources, and to find new meaning in this act of gathering. It intends to encourage you to create without knowing the outcome. It embraces spontaneity, surprise, and revels in the processes of making without the pressures of planning.

I will take you through a series of writing exercises, using found materials, random word generators, navigational expressions, and myriad other ways of playing with language and print. We will then have time to play around with the new texts generated through these exercises, experimenting with different ways of using text as a visual, graphic material in the zine format. I will be using simple methods that anyone can use, so there is no need to be writer – all you need is an itch to explore what happens when you find things that unexpectedly belong together and tell a story.

The workshop is free, and all materials will be provided, as well as some examples to get you inspired. If you want to bring some texts to deconstruct and work with however, feel free to do so! It can be anything, from yesterday’s newspaper to photocopies of your favourite book! Each participant will work on their own zine(s) and be able to bring their creations home. This workshop can accommodate both English and Swedish speakers. The text material we will work with during the workshop can be in any language!

We kindly ask you to RSVP for this workshop so we can know how many participants to expect.
RSVP at: cutpastezines@gmail.com
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Frida Häggström Gerdt is a Stockholm-based graphic designer, dancer and artist with a great love for artist’s books and zines. With one foot in traditional printmaking and book binding and the other one in digital design, she creates interesting synergies between the two worlds of technology and craft. Her ways of working resemble collecting pieces for a puzzle with an unknown outcome, and many times her artistic practice functions as a therapeutic diary; preserving old and new memories, emotions and encrypted secrets. She has an exploratory way of working, and often lets mere coincidences lead the way forward. Frida likes to work with text in both expressive and minimalistic ways. She likes how words taste, how they sound and feel, and even look. How their combination can be shivering, and how their incorrectness can make them even more right.

Frida studied Artists’ books at Grafikskolan for two years and has recently focused on picture book making while attending a couple of courses at HDK-Valand (‘Making Stories Through Picture Books’ and ‘Visual Narrative’).

Cut/paste is the graduation project of Isabelle Ribe, initiated as part of the International Master’s in Curating Art at Stockholm University.

Photograph credit: Frida Häggström-Gerdt