As a part of our latest window installation, Pakiramdam, Alex Kostiw is hosting two comic workshops!

The artist will host two guided workshops that will prompt recollection, writing, and/or drawing to visualize our memories and encode them into short poetry comics. Each one starts with a look at abstract comics, poetry comics, and montage techniques for inspiration. Everyone is welcome—no previous experience with comics or creative writing is required.
Object Memory – Saturday, July 17th at 2pm
Participants will bring in a personal artifact—an heirloom or object with a long history (or several pictures of one)—to use as the basis for their comic. After a brief look at abstract and poetry comics, we’ll collect memories related to the object, and use them to structure and create a comic.

In Other Words – Saturday, July 31st at 2pm
Participants will use a favorite line of poetry or prose to generate the content and structure for their comics. We’ll look at examples of montage and related techniques from a variety of sources. Then, we will collect, curate, and montage personal and inherited memories in an original comic.
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Pakiramdam by Alex Kostiw
July 3 at 5 PM to July 31
In the windows of Co-Prosperity – 3219 S Morgan, Chicago

Pakiramdam, meaning intuition or feeling, explores how distances both actual and metaphorical render the real as otherworldly, and ways that kinship connects us across such distances. It encodes a personal history of immigration, migration, parentage, and embodiments of hybridity along the way, bringing the ghostly and human into a single space. In the project, ghosts are not just representations of the past, they are disembodied presences who are a phone call, text message, or video chat—a technological “seance”—away. Meanwhile, to be human is to contend with demands for exactitude, specific locations in space and time, and visible manifestations of identity.
The fabric panels reference family photos taken in the Philippines and, later, Sweden, household objects that relate to the family’s origins, and the Barong Tagalog and Filipiniana dresses, traditional Filipino garments that have elements reflecting the Spanish colonial era. Painted on the windows, a comic illustrates a simple act of folding bed linens. With overlays and layerings that include viewers’ reflections in the glass, the project interrogates distinctions between body and person, stranger and self, parent and child, or immigrant and local; between absence and presence, especially when only distanced interaction is possible; and, within the multifaceted (or multiracial) identity, between authenticity and synthesis.
As the viewing angle changes, our ghost and human bodies come together and shift apart.
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Learn more at Coprosperity.org

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Tags: Alex Kostiw, Bridgeport, Chicago, Co-prosperity, Pakiramdam