Stories Beneath the Surface – Inspired by Max Ernst

For adults & youth 16+, no art experience required.

This workshop brings together storytelling and creative mixed media techniques to explore migration, movement, and personal pathways. It builds on the work of Max Ernst, a German artist and key figure of Dada and Surrealism, whose life and work were shaped by migration and exile. Ernst found playful and inventive ways to turn memory, movement, and personal experience into images, developing experimental techniques such as frottage, grattage, and decalcomania. In his paintings, ideas of migration and transformation often surface through bird figures and hybrid forms, where technique, biography, and imagination flow together.

These ideas and methods form the starting point for the workshop and invite participants into an open, creative journey of their own. Building on this approach, participants work with creative art techniques and collage, drawing from Max Ernst’s methods and way of working. The focus stays on the creative process: layering, shifting, combining, responding. Images unfold step by step, following their own rhythm and direction. Rather than aiming for a finished artwork, the workshop invites an open exploration, where one choice naturally leads to the next.

The workshop connects to the Shared Flight artist residency, which focuses on migration and on how individual and collective paths, stories, and experiences can take visual form. It is open to people with migration histories, as well as those who are curious to learn more about migration stories through creative painting, art history, and shared exchange.

Facilitated by artist-in-residence Doro Buch.

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Host or Publisher Claudia Chagoya