Cutting (Up) with the Ancestors
About this Event
Documentation Clinic with Ric Kasini Kadour: Noon-2PM at Kolaj Institute
Collage Workshop with S. Erin Batiste: 2-4PM at Kolaj Institute
Do you have old photographs and letters from an aunty, parent or grandparent who has departed, now housed in boxes or forgotten albums? This workshop explores memory work and how we can use keepsakes to preserve and build our own personal, radical archives. We will discuss, learn, and play with how to honor and respectfully use the materials we’ve inherited and been left with to make powerful memorials and art works using photographs and documents from the past.
Centering Black, Indigenous, and Queer communities whose lives and experiences are often excluded and erased from the archive at large, we invite you to join S. Erin, poet and artist-in-residence, bring your personal, family, and found artifacts, and together we will build out fuller memories, and make speculative histories or counterhistories for our ancestors and beloveds. With the generosity of Kolaj Institute, there will also be an imaging clinic onsite with appointments where participants will learn how to scan and digitally archive their items, and some printing will be available so that everyone can take home a new collage work that incorporates an archive. Come early to scan, stay to cut and play!
ABOUT S. ERIN BATISTE
Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary poet and artist S. Erin Batiste is Kolaj Institute's Solo Artist in Residence, 31 August-6 September 2026. During her Solo Residency, Batiste will continue work on her collage series, which reclaims and transforms archives and early 1900’s mugshot photographs of Black women and girls from the New Orleans Public Library Archive. She plans to visit The Historic New Orleans Collection and Tulane University Special Collections to learn more about Black life and living during Reconstruction and the Jim Crow South following the Civil War and the overwhelming and violent backlash after the abolition of slavery, and to research the Storyville red light district where many of the women attempted to claim themselves and agency, and make a way in the new United States.
S. Erin Batiste's practice is rooted in accumulation and maximalism, and she is influenced by beauty, otherworlds, waymaking and migration, divination and astrology, Americana, archives, and what remains. Her work examines themes of freedom, the complexity of memory, what we consider history, and the ways we all inherit and collect possessions and stories. Providence (handmade art zine, four editions, 2024 and 2025), along with And The Glory Will Be Revealed (University of New Orleans Press, forthcoming, 2026) reclaim early 1900’s century mugshot photographs of Black women and girls from the New Orleans Public Library. The book itself is an intervention. Batiste is a 2026 Corsicana Writer in Residence and a 2025-2028 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow in Literature. Batiste runs Revival Archival Cards, Collage & Salvage—a mobile arts studio in Brooklyn. www.sbatistewrites.com
Questions? Send an email to [email protected].
Note: This is an in-person event. It will neither be streamed nor recorded.
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