Cartographies of the Imagination

Student Workshop

17 - 18 July 2021


A weekend drawing workshop run by Cartographies of the Imagination curators Kirsty Badenoch and Sayan Skandarajah in association with Drawing Matter, invited all university students engaged with the expanded process of drawing to join us on a voyage of experimental world-building.

Together, we explored alternative practices of charting physical places alongside people, memories, events and narratives. To map is both a method of understanding and documenting, but within its enactment lie fundamental questions of truth and subjectivity, control, projection, and the navigation of places between the real and the imaginary. 

Working with drawings from the Drawing Matter archive including works by Zaha Hadid, Peter Wilson and Guy Debord, we invited participants to examine, re-imagine and re-inhabit drawings as worlds within themselves. We experimented with new and unorthodox drawing practices, and fundamentally challenged the way we dissect, interpret and rebuild the world around us.




Drawing Laboratory

The salon was part of the Drawing Laboratory: A series of experimental workshops exploring how we navigate, percieve and translate the world around us through drawing.

Through a series of evening salons, day and weekend workshops, we invited school children and youth groups, art and architecture students, artists, makers, growers and other creatives to participate in a giant collaborative map of the imagination. The map was drawn, redrawn and re-re-drawn over the course of the festival, by the eyes, hands and imaginations of many.

With a multi-disciplinary approach to speculative drawing and map-making practices at all different scales, the Drawing Laboratory uncovered, interpreted and reimagined the hidden secrets and stories around us; exploring how we experience place, both individually and as a collective. Experimenting with different drawing processes, found and made materials and engaging all our senses, each workshop traced, translated and re-imagined a new layer each responding to the ideas and drawings of the last. Through an additive and open-ended process, together we built, grew and populated the cities, gardens and mindscapes of our collective imagination. Together, we drew Cosmocartos.

The Drawing Laboratory collaborative map was exhibited in the greenhouses as it emerged over the course of the festival. Its official inauguration was on our last day - Friday 30 July, where we invited all participants to celebrate their part in it’s making.