Recap | Christina Battle Workshop

Wednesday, December 11, 2019

Artist and filmmaker Christina Battle’s workshop, Postcards for a Better Budget: Reimagining the Cut was a display of resistance towards the Alberta government’s 2019 austerity budget and devastating cut to arts funding. The workshop began with a screening of two films by artists Christopher Harris and Lydia Moyer, then continued on to a workshop about postcard making. This workshop was held on Wednesday, December 11, 2019 and was a way for artists and cultural workers to voice their disapproval for the current Alberta government.

Christopher Harris’ film still/here examines the north side of St. Louis, Missouri, overcome with ruin and social despair. The artist shot the footage in 2001 on 16mm black & white film and the view of his hometown is ghostly, and one of painful absence. Although the film is comprised mostly of long takes on St. Louis’ urban decay, the real tragedy is human, and the echoes of the people most affected by poverty in the United States pierce through as warped telephone dials and disembodied answering machines. Lydia Moyer’s work, The Forcing (no.1) juxtaposes social unrest with idyllic visions of nature through the use of audio-visual collage. Audio from a clash between police and protestors is overlaid on top of a video of two deer nervously entering a family’s home, and audio of people watching deer in a nearby park is overlaid on top of video of a drone attack. The resulting film was a chillingly off-kilter look at the environmental and political conditions of the United States, where the lines between chaos and serenity are increasingly blurred. By showcasing these two films before the workshop, Christina Battle foregrounded the importance of collage aesthetics and offered up a subtle warning of the dangers of economic despair and government abandonment.

After the short film screening, Battle led the postcard-making workshop alongside a selection of homemade treats, promoting an atmosphere of care and optimism in the space. A variety of materials and source images were available for use including  educational pamphlets, biological fact sheets, illustrations and the 2019 Alberta budget. By foregrounding the use of collage in the workshop, Battle introduced participants to a different way of thinking, offering them the ability to form new meaning from excessively long and abstract legal documents. Approaches to creating postcards were varied across the board as some postcards took on a more staunch political stance, while others incorporated satire or more symbolic uses of imagery and text. Battle’s foregrounding of optimism as a means of opposition during her workshop demonstrates that in the face of overwhelming odds, postcard-sized messages are a viable first step toward getting a point across.