5-week online class via Zoom
Wednesdays, September 8 – October 6, 2024
6 - 8 pm ET / 11 pm – 1 am BST/UK
Admission: $145 Patreon Members / $160 General Admission

PLEASE NOTE: All classes will be recorded those unable to attend live

"The bird sings best on his family tree" — traditional proverb

Join visual artist and filmmaker Chiara Ambrosio on a journey to transform personal history and family trauma into art, seeking catharsis through making, letting the hands mend and give voice to the unspeakable.

We all come from somewhere, and often our journeys lead us far away from our point of origin until we forget it altogether, through necessity or circumstance.

As we move and grow, we often look back--in wonder, fear or anxiety--towards the landscapes of our childhood. Sometimes we see bright worlds of innocence, but often too we encounter the many phantoms that follow us around and cast shade over our lives.

Both the light and the dark form our biography, and if harnessed constructively, these can yield great growth and creativity.

Many cultures share the belief that it is fundamental to return to the family tree to heal, understanding that, while keeping the roots watered, we also need to prune those fronds so that the light can reach us where we stand, help us understand more about ourselves, and grow.

In this five-week practical course, Chiara will draw on elements of her own artistic practice, alongside that of other artists and authors who have dealt with this rich material, to offer insights and strategies on how to turn our own biography into art, a personal quest that will lead us under our own canopies to see what grows there.

We will think about family trees both literally and laterally, encompassing both people and landscapes that can populate a personal mythography, looking at works of art that have dealt with biographical material in an array of different ways, and that will include the works of Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Roland Barthes, Juan Rulfo, Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Laurie Anderson, Victor Erice, Alejandro Jodorowsky, John Crowley, Madge Gill, Paula Rego and many, many more.

Through a series of creative prompts, we will turn back to our own biographies to identify the source material that forms us- our own family tree--and explore how these stories can shape, affect, hinder and- ultimately- set us free.

We will also be thinking about the idea of transgression, exploring supernatural ancestor relationships within many religious traditions, thinking of new ways in which secular societies can support these relationships across space and time, and what creative strategies we can learn from them.

The final session will offer a safe space in which to share the outcomes of this journey with the rest of the class.

Week 1: Drawing our family tree
What constitutes a family tree- people, objects, landscapes, time.

Week 2: Family ties- beyond life and death
The visible and invisible networks that bind us and how.

Week 3: Exorcisms and shadow spaces
Conjuring the ancestors and realizing their unfulfilled dreams

Week 4: Letting go- planting the seeds
Grief and loss as source for our own liberation

Week 5: Stepping out of the shade of the tree and watching it bloom.
In this final class we will present our works to one another.

All artwork by the Chiara Ambrosio.

Chiara Ambrosio is a London-based filmmaker, visual artist and curator, working with the moving image, photography, painting, sound and printed matter to explore the ways in which we perceive, remember, articulate and preserve personal and collective histories and senses of place, and how we may construct new rituals within secular societies through art.

Her work pays witness to and portrays that which struggles on the fringes of dominant narratives- communities, landscapes, stories, dreams, objects, perceptions, sensibilities - excluded and marginalised for a variety of different reasons but always fundamental to our understanding of what makes us human- "Keep looking for things in places where there is nothing" (Jonas Mekas). She thinks that the artist's role is akin to that of a medium, making visible what hovers just beyond perception- whether through painting, printmaking, film or sound, re-enchanting the world until it hums with possibility.

She is a long-term collaborator of musician Amanda Palmer, and her work includes collaborations with composers, poets and anthropologists, and has been presented extensively both nationally and internationally at venues such as The Whitechapel Gallery, Anthology Film Archives and La Cinematheque Francaise.

For the last decade she has been one of the custodians of books and their stories at Bookartbookshop, a small community artist bookstore in Shoreditch, as well as curating regular shows, events and festivals at London’s cult venue The Horse Hospital.

She produces “Raft”, a monthly radio show on London’s Resonance 104.4 fm radio station, where she embarks on walks across the city with other Londoners, reaping and sowing stories within its streets.

Chiara is the publisher of a monthly photographic zine, As Far As The Eye Can Travel.