This two-day practice-based workshop explores the idea of archival potentiality through creative practice and inquiry. During the workshop, up to ten students will join the instructors in examining personal and institutional photographic collections to engage with the theme of home. Rather than approaching photographs as records bounded solely by their temporality or historical context, participants will be asked to also think about their affective and visual ‘weight.’ How can archival images prompt us to think about how we represent and construct the past? How might they allow us to imagine other temporal trajectories, and to create alternative visions of what has been and what might be?

For the workshop, participants will be asked to bring a collection of their own family photographs (physical or digital), and institutional collections of archival images will also be made available. Over the course of the workshop, participants will learn to digitize and process images and will work to develop new creative works from the material they have assembled. The form this work takes will be left to participants, whether it is a photographic essay, a collage, a combination of text and image, or another approach developed in coordination with the instructors. The workshop will conclude with an exhibition of the works created by participants and an accompanying digital presentation of the same works on the Kashkul web platform. 

Registration will be closed on October 27, and the workshop will be conducted in English. Capacity is limited to ten participants and applying early is recommended. The application form can be found through this link. 

Nathaniel Brunt is an interdisciplinary scholar, documentary photographer, and educator. His documentary and academic work critically examines modern armed conflict and the ways it is, and has been, represented photographically. Brunt completed his PhD in the joint Communication and Culture program at Toronto Metropolitan University and York University, with research supported by SSHRC and the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation.

Brunt’s photographic work has been widely published and exhibited internationally. He is currently working on long-term projects in Northern Iraq and the Kashmir Valley and holds appointments as a KULA Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Victoria Libraries and a Hannah Arendt Fellow at TIB (Technische Informationsbibliothek – Leibniz-Informationszentrum Technik und Naturwissenschaften und Universitätsbibliothek) in Hannover, Germany. While diverse in format, his work is united by a commitment to producing projects that personalize the often-abstract nature of modern war.

Marc Marin Webb is an architect and holds a PhD in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures from the University of Pennsylvania (2026, Roger Allen Dissertation Award), where his dissertation examined the preservation of Yezidi sacred landscapes after the 2014 genocide. Trained as an architect in Barcelona and Berlin, he has worked on archaeological and heritage-preservation projects across Syria, Iraqi Kurdistan, and southern Iraq, including the conservation of the Yezidi Sanctuary of Sheikh Adi in Lalish since 2019. He is co-founder of the Sersal Project, an initiative dedicated to preserving, digitizing, and returning Yezidi photographic heritage to the communities it depicts, launched after he rediscovered a forgotten archive of 1930s Yezidi photographs at the Penn Museum.