A workshop exploring imagemaking and writing as practices of care and acknowledgment.
Drawing on her work in animated documentary and first-person narrative storytelling, visual anthropologist and poet Darcy Alexandra invites us to explore imagemaking and writing as practices of regard. Engaging with photographs from our archives, Alexandra leads us through a series of writing experiments for attending to what images hold, what they ask, and what threads they reveal. From this foundation, we will pay attention to the senses, feelings, and textures that shape how we engage with and interpret our research — what we notice, what moves us, and what lingers. This workshop is about slowing down, looking carefully, and following what emerges.
Event language: English (with close-captions for online participants).
Darcy Alexandra (she/her) is a visual anthropologist, filmmaker, and poet, whose scholarship thinks affectively through form. Engaging with animated documentary, filmic portraiture, and first-person narrative storytelling, her research turns toward what is chronic, foreclosed, and difficult to document. Her film The Woman You Look For, co-directed with animation artist Michaela Müller, traces dispossession through closed adoption using paint-on-glass animation. Waters Otherwise is a landscape ethnography examining ecological practices of care in the Sonoran Desert borderlands through moving image and poetry. She names this approach practices of regard: speculative, multimodal responses to chronic conditions of violence and unknowability. Alexandra is a visiting lecturer in visual anthropology at the University of Amsterdam.
Image credits: Documentary stills from “Waters Otherwise” (Alexandra) and “The Woman You Look For” (Alexandra & Muller).
Registrations open a month ahead
This event is part of the Engaging Publics hybrid workshop series exploring community-based research from facilitation, process-documentation, engaged writing, and more.
All workshops are free and open to all. Registrations will open a month ahead.
Except the on-site only workshop in November, all events can be accessed online via Zoom or on site at DOCK cultural space in Basel, Switzerland.
June 20, 2026 | 3:30–6:30 pm CEST | Workshop | online and at DOCK Basel
Practices of Regard: Images, Memories, Words
with Darcy Alexandra (she/her), Visual Anthropologist, Filmmaker & Poet
Sep 5, 2026 | 3:30–6:30 pm CEST | Workshop | online and at DOCK Basel
Public Fictions: Methods for (World)Building Different Futures
with Ann Mbuti (she/her), Independent Writer
Sep 19, 2026 | 3:30–6:30 pm CEST | Workshop | online and at DOCK Basel
Working with the Archive: Reflecting on Collective Research
With Hybrid Project Space, Interdisciplinary Collective
Oct 17, 2026 | 3:30–6:30 pm CEST | Workshop | online and at DOCK Basel
Letters I Never Sent: Yearning in Science Fiction
With Sherida Kuffour(she/her), Art Director, Design Educator & Publisher
Oct 31, 2026 | 3:30–6:30 pm CET | Workshop | online and at DOCK Basel
The Language of Art: Celebrating Connection Through Doing Art
With Habib Afsar (he/none), Expressive Arts Practitioner, Relational Artist & Public Health Physician
Nov 07, 2026 | 3:30–6:30 pm CET | Workshop | on-site only at DOCK Basel
Co-Producing Publics: Questioning, Performative Acts, and Temporary Interventions
With Circuit Sessions Collective
and Eva Chen (she/her) Scenographer & Art Educator
