Sprung in Paris during the interwar period, the movement of surrealism lay at the heart of multiple crossings. The direct descendant of the Dada movement, but with a different political agenda, informed by psychiatry and psychoanalysis, though focusing on the creative power of the unconscious, dreams, and insanity, fascinated with fortuitous encounters of words, but offering specific instructions for the production of art, surrealism will allow the participants of this workshop to explore matters of representation, inspiration, production of art and meaning. The aforementioned components of the surrealist movement will be presented through various forms of art, as a way of ushering participants into surreality, the ultimate official goal of the surrealists, where opposites coalesce, defying logic.
The proposed workshop is structured upon a two-fold objective, that is, introducing participants to surrealist artistic practices, and guiding them through a number of in-class tasks focusing on narrative production. Dream narratives, automatic writing, double-images, the art of the insane will be employed as means to delve into the narrative crossroads that surrealism explored.
