Building community: Merging past and present | Workshop

During this interactive session, you will hear about the artists’ experience delivering the CAMERA project to community groups in Mexico City and Glasgow. They’ll will reflect on the successes and challenges encountered along the way and guide you through the exhibition at the RSE.

You’ll then take part in some interactive activities. To do these, please could all attendees bring a photograph (whether on your phone or physical). This should be a photograph from the past showing either you, your family or a place which has some significance to you, something that holds a memory, story or a past connection. You’ll use this as a prompt to write a short narrative. No prior experience in either writing or photography is required.

This workshop goes alongside an exhibition that will be open from Saturday 5 September - Sunday 13 September. You can book tickets and find out more info here.

CAMERA is a community engagement project led by Dr Alessia Zinnari (University of Glasgow) and artist Alex Withey. It is grounded in participatory arts research and explores the ways in which photography and writing can help people (re)gain agency over their mind and body, fostering a sense of wellbeing, belonging to place, and human connection. Working with memory through a variety of sensorial inputs is crucial to our methodology. The project consists of a series of participant-centred workshops, usually involving people from a local community with no easy access to art training. Our objective is to re-imagine new, positive ways to build communities and coexist with others, whether human or non-human.

Important points to note

• This event is suitable for age 16+
• Event format: This event is a workshop and may involve some audience interaction. This could involve group activities, individual activities, quizzes or hands-on activities.

• Filming: Photography may take place at this event. Please let a member of the RSE Public Engagement team know if you do not want to be photographed.

SPEAKER

Lecturer in Italian, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Glasgow

Alessia Zinnari is an interdisciplinary scholar with specialism in Italian, Comparative Literature, Gender Studies and Visual Culture Studies. She uses feminist methodologies to explore the intersections between power, self-representation, the body, and trauma in modern and contemporary literature and art. She has published on Italian poet Alda Merini and English Surrealist Leonora Carrington, and she is now working on a monograph that compares the two artists and their use of words and images to overcome their experiences of illness and violence. Alessia also has a keen interest in community engagement and social justice through research and art, and, together with artist Alex Withey, has developed the participatory art project CAMERA, which engages communities in artmaking. Her latest publication is the book chapter "“My stomach was the mirror of the earth”: An Ecofeminist Reading of Leonora Carrington’s Memoir of Illness, Down Below" in Female Surrealist Artists and Mental Illness (MUP, 2026).

SPEAKER

Senior Technician (Photography), Glasgow Schol of Art

Artist and educator Alex Withey, born in Helsinki in 1988, works across photography, installation, and participatory workshops, and is currently Photography Technician at the Glasgow School of Art. His interdisciplinary practice explores the life of images and the assumptions around photographic truth and representation. His recent project gathers images from Mexico City’s urban fabric, where built and natural environments touch, press against, and blur into one another. The city is reimagined outside linear time, as both remembered future and unresolved past. In these works, fragmented landscapes emerge: veiled, partially hidden, emptied of bodies yet dense with traces of intervention, communication, and presence. Monumental and minute details appear on the same plane. Moving from screen to acetate, the images are transformed through alternative photographic processes and local ingredients, including cyanotypes altered by sun, time, and toning. Each transfer makes the image partial, unstable, and still forming.

About the Curious festival

The RSE’s free Curious festival of knowledge is back, from Saturday 5 − Sunday 13 September 2026!

Curious is Scotland’s annual festival of knowledge. Across its seven-year history, Curious has welcomed over 10,000 attendees into its yearly programme of talks, workshops, discussions and exhibitions – all covering different topics and subject areas. There’s no need for you to have any prior specialist knowledge before coming along, just bring your curious self! With plenty of events both in person and online, you can take part from anywhere.

You can check out the full programme of events here.

Accessibility

We aim to make events as accessible as possible. If you have any accessibility requirements or have any questions related to how we can support this event, please contact [email protected]. Accessibility information for the RSE building can be found on our website.

• Step-free access: Ramped access for visitors is available via 26 George Street through Lakeland. Upon arrival, please call 0131 240 5000 and a member of staff will meet you and guide you to the event. Please note that the entrance ramp has a steep gradient (1:12).

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