A Photographic Exchange: Workshop with Manuel Vason

Over two days we will practice photography as a methodology to communicate and connect with the ash trees of a small forest near Folkestone.

Saturday 11 & Sunday 12 August 2018, 10-5pm, you must be available to attend both days of the workshop

Folkestone Downs, Meet at the Brewery Tap on Tontine Street

Instead of using photography as an observatory tool that replicates reality from distance, we will explore the medium as a stage on which to enact a correspondence between photographers and plants. Using intuition and imagination we will search for individual ways to interact with the trees and we will investigate creative ways to document those actions with photography. The workshop is open to anybody willing to explore the ash trees as companion for a new photographic and performative adventure.

Over the two days you will engage with an experimental photographic practice that considers the photographic relationship as a transfer of energy between subjects, to explore ways to move the photographic discourse away from a site of capture. The trees are viewed as a breathing, living participant in the act of creation

Manuel Vason was born in Padua, Italy in 1974.  In 2012 he presented STILL_MÓVIL, a traveling exhibition of ‘co-creations’ with 45 choreographers from South America. In 2014 he launched the Double Exposures book project at The Photographers Gallery and Tate Britain in London. In 2015, Vason received a grant from Arts Council England for his project titled The Photo Performer. Vason continues to develop a practice that integrates different media and forms of collaboration. Vason’s artistic practice explores the relationship between photography and performance, presence and representation. He considers the capturing of a moment as an act of creation, a ritual towards the illusion of immortality, and an exchange between who is in front and who is behind the camera. The collaborative nature of his practice shapes a unique, hybrid art form and generates new vocabularies. His collaborations to date have produced some of the most iconic images of performance and his work has been published and presented internationally.

Visit Manuel Vason’s website