Oct 23, 2026 at 10:00 am – Oct 25, 2026 at 4:30 pm
Uneasy Arrangements:
Collage, Animation & the Archive
With Kelly Sears, Bill Morrison, Keisha Scarville and the Anti-Banality Union
Every image carries the intentions, assumptions, and histories of its making. Yet these meanings are never fixed. When images are displaced, recast, and recontextualized, they can spark new meanings, unexpected connections, and critical perspectives. What if we deliberately unsettled the image, using collage, remix, and transformation to intervene in its intended function, revealing other possibilities latent within the frame? For this workshop, we’re thrilled to host filmmaker and animator Kelly Sears to think through the politics and aesthetics of reappropriating, reassembling and mutating images.
Join us for an exploration of the creative possibilities that exist in the cracks and seams of our contemporary visual culture to critically engage with the prevailing image regime. We’ll consider the image as raw material; a flexible, unfixed, and malleable resource available for the artist to cut up, reassemble and collage to generate new narratives, temporalities and performances. We’ll approach collage not simply as a visual technique, but as a way of thinking: a practice of transformation and resourcefulness.
Across these intensive 3-days we’ll be asking questions like: What can be revealed when an image is released from its original context? What happens when historical documents, institutional archives, family photographs, fragmented media and ephemeral scraps of everyday life are brought into collision? How can our cultural detritus become a site of play and invention? How can we turn a culture of surveillance and consumption into its own criticism?
Kelly Sears will lead participants through her own collage-based practice, at the intersection of animation, archival, speculative fiction and documentary. She’ll be joined by an all-star cast of artists who know how to recycle: Bill Morrison, “the poet laureate of lost films”, will elaborate on his recent work with surveillance materials; the Anti-banality Union will share examples of composite imagery reframing the assumptions of mainstream media; and acclaimed photographer Keisha Scarville will elaborate on her iterative approach to reinterpretation and artistic reappropriation.
Participants will leave with a deeper understanding of how the unstable image might become a space for imagining something otherwise, and of collage as an aesthetic and political strategy. No prior experience with collage or found footage is required—just a curiosity about images and their afterlives.
Details
Open to everyone, though the workshop setting is best suited for filmmakers, film producers, journalists, curators and media artists.
Give us an idea of who you are and why you are coming. When you register you will be asked for a short statement of interest that should briefly describe your experience and a film project (it would be great if you have a project in progress that you would present to the group during the work-in-progress critique sessions), plus a bio. There’s a spot for a link to a work sample (and CV, which would also be nice, but is not required).
$295 early bird registration ends on Oct 16, 2026.
$350 regular registration.
The deposit is non-refundable. Should you need to cancel, you’ll receive half of your registration fee back until Oct 16. After Oct 16, the fee is non-refundable.
No animation software is required for participation in this workshop.
In order to keep costs down, this workshop is a BYOL, i.e. bring your own laptop. Students must be fully proficient using and operating their computers.
To register for a workshop, students must pay in full via card, check, or cash . After the early bird registration deadline of Oct 16, course fees are not refundable or transferable and any withdrawals or deadlines will result in the full cost of the class being forfeit. There will be no exceptions. To withdraw from a course please email info-at-uniondocs.org.
In the event that a workshop does not receive sufficient enrollment, it may be canceled. Students will be notified at least 48 hours prior to the start of a cancelled workshop and will be refunded within 5 business days. If we reschedule a workshop to another date, students are also entitled to a full refund. UnionDocs reserves the right to change instructors without prior notification, and to change class location and meeting times by up to an hour with 48 hours prior notice.
Please note: Participants are accepted on a first-come, first-serve basis.
Schedule
Friday, October 23
10:00am – 10:30am Welcome & intros
10:30am – 12:30pm Intro session with Kelly Sears
12:30am – 2:00pm Lunch
2:00pm – 4:00pm Session with Bill Morrison
4:00pm – 4:30pm Wrap Up Discussion with Kelly additional exercises / discussion
Saturday, October 24
10:00am – 10:30am Warm up, inspiring references, case studies
10:30am – 12:30pm Session with Anti-banality Union
12:30am – 2:00pm Lunch
2:00pm – 4:00pm Creative feedback session with Kelly
4:00pm – 4:30pm Wrap Up Discussion with Kelly, additional exercises / discussion
Sunday, October 25
10:00am – 10:30am Warm up, inspiring references, case study, eye training.
10:30am – 12:30pm Session with Keisha Scarville
12:30am – 1:30pm Final discussion
Each day follows this general structure, with some minor variations and substitutions:
Warm up, inspiring references, case study, eye training.
Presentation by guest speaker + individual work-in-progress critique
Share / Discussion / Exercise
Presentation by guest speaker + individual work-in-progress critique
Workshop Exercise + Critique
Kelly Sears uses experimental animation to reconfigure familiar source imagery. Her films move between documentary and speculative fiction, reimagining social and political pasts and possible futures. Through cutting and collage, she untethers images from their intended use, creating slippages between the familiar and the fantastic. Her films have been screened at festivals such as Sundance, Slamdance, South by Southwest, the American Film Institute, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and museums such as MoMA, the Hammer Museum, and the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. She is an Associate Professor in the Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts Department and Director of the Brakhage Center at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Bill Morrison has been called “the poet laureate of lost films” (New York Times, 9/21/2021). He has premiered feature-length documentary films at the New York, Sundance, Telluride and Venice film festivals. Decasia (2002) was the first film of the 21st century to be named to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry. Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016) has been listed as one of the best films of its decade (2010s) by the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, and Vanity Fair, among others. Incident (2023) won the International Documentary Association’s Best Short Film Award from in 2023, the Cinema Eye Honors award for Outstanding Nonfiction Short in 2025, and it was nominated for an Academy Award in Documentary Short in 2025. His most recent film, Sawyer Avenue: Sunday Afternoon (18’, 2026) premiered this year at Visions du Réel 2026, and won two jury awards at the UnArchive Found Footage Festival 2026.
The Anti-Banality Union is a collective that re-cuts Hollywood blockbusters into new feature-length films. Their work has been screened at Spectacle Theater, Anthology Film Archives, the Museum of the Moving Image, and several undisclosed squats & communes.
Keisha Scarville (b. Brooklyn, NY; lives in Brooklyn, NY) weaves together themes dealing with loss, latencies, and the elusive body. Her work has been widely exhibited, including the International Center of Photography, Studio Museum of Harlem, Huxley-Parlour in London, ICA Philadelphia, Contact Gallery in Toronto, Lightwork, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Higher Pictures, and Webber Gallery in Los Angeles. Recent exhibitions include The 2nd Biennial das Amazonias (curated by Manuela Moscoso); 2025 Les Rencontres d’Arles; The Rose at CPW (curated by Justine Kurland and Marina Chao); If I Had a Hammer – Fotofest Biennial, Houston (2022); and All of Them Witches, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (2020, curated by Dan Nadel and Laurie Simmons). Her work is held in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Yale University Art Gallery, George Eastman House, Denver Museum of Art, and the Detroit Institute of Arts, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She has participated in residencies at Lightwork, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, WOPHA, Baxter Street CCNY, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In addition, her work has appeared in Vice, Small Axe, and The New York Times where her work has also received critical review. She is a recipient of the 2026 Brooklyn Museum UOVO Prize, the 2023 Creator Lab Photo Fund, and the inaugural Saltzman Prize in Photography in 2024. She is currently a Visiting Professor in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University and a faculty member at Parsons School of Design in New York. Her first book, lick of tongue rub of finger on soft wound, was published by MACK and shortlisted in the 2023 Aperture/Paris PhotoBook Awards. Her second book with MACK was published in Spring 2026 and awarded the 2026 Les Rencontres d’Arles Author Book Award.
