Happy to announce that Kremena Dimitrova will be joining us in Olomouc on Friday the 11th of October for a double feature – the lecture takes place at 9am CET (KAA 2.40), and the workshop will start at 3pm CET (KAA 2.40). Please sign up with your email to reserve one or both events. (KAA is in the back buildings of Křižovského 10, Olomouc). Sign up here! This event is open to both students and interested members of the public, but only those who are registered can join.
Comics Workshop: Comics-as-Maps-as-Poetry: A Founding Father’s Story/Finding Others’ Stories
Duration: 3 hours
“Creative and collaborative work helps to uncover and communicate marginalised and diverse stories. But, it is essential to acknowledge how much we do not – and will never – know about children’s lives in the past. This offers valuable scope to engage visitors in the practice and ethics of research and story-telling.” (Lamb & Pooley, 2023, p. 2). Traversing histories and geographies across time and space, this workshop draws on R.G. Collingwood’s (1946/1994, p. 245) theory and approach to re-constructing knowledge about the past that relies on the historical imagination, or in Collingwood’s own words “… the historian’s picture of the past is… in every detail an imaginary picture…”.
Using Kremena Dimitrova’s comics-based research as an anchor point, this workshop invites a creative dive into the world of an 18C runaway boy by experimenting with comics-as-maps-as-poetry approaches to archival/historical visualisation. Paper Trails: Kremena Dimitrova | MBC (museumofbritishcolonialism.org)
All materials provided
Maximum 20 participants
Duration: 1.5 hours lecture / 30min Q&A
“Slavery sustained the United Kingdom’s vast eighteenth-century empire, and many masters came home with some of the men, women, and children they held in bondage. When these ran away, slaveholders inevitably sought to recapture them and break their will to independence.” Prof. Vincent Brown (Runaway Slaves in Britain :: Home (gla.ac.uk).
“How do we represent those who cannot be written about but whom we know were present?” (Bressey, 2013, p. 122)
This lecture offers a glimpse into Kremena Dimitrova’s comics-based research through co-creation from a child’s perspective. With the help of children, Kremena invites visions of a biographical museum without borders that transcend Benjamin Franklin House’s conventional focus on a master history, instead becoming a transformative odyssey for alternative marginalised narratives. This is achieved through the ingenious use of comics-as-maps-as-poetry, whose storytelling and meaning making potentials have thus far been critically and creatively examined individually and in duos but not as a trio.
