Presentation and Collage Making: The Silent Book: Crafting Memories from a Life with Cancer – Eva C. Karpinski & Pam Patterson
Date: Feb 8th, 2012, 12-1.30pm
Location: CWSE, OISE/UT, 252 Bloor Street West, Rm 2-227
Free and all are welcome.
The Silent Book: Crafting Memories from a Life with Cancer is a visual and textual collaborative autobiography project that addresses several complex and perplexing questions pertaining to living in the postcancer body. Women’s experiences of cancer cut across so many levels of subjective and objective reality that they can only be articulated in a fragmentary manner, through a bricolage of discontinuous narratives and mixed images. For this session, Patterson & Karpinski will discuss both personal cancer experiences and their associated politics. We invite participants to join us in making collages from found printed text and images. Readings may include: cancer journals; emails from friends and doctors; quotations from famous cancer survivors; citations from the popular scientific and medical lore on cancer; and statistical data. The event will engage multiple, and perhaps contradictory, discourses that construct the intimate and public dimensions of women’s encounters with cancer. We will create a visual archive of personal memories that speak of our bodily experiences, medicalization, pain, and empowerment, as well as our spiritual and intellectual transformations and activism.
Location: CWSE, OISE/UT, 252 Bloor Street West, Rm 2-227
Free and all are welcome.
The Silent Book: Crafting Memories from a Life with Cancer is a visual and textual collaborative autobiography project that addresses several complex and perplexing questions pertaining to living in the postcancer body. Women’s experiences of cancer cut across so many levels of subjective and objective reality that they can only be articulated in a fragmentary manner, through a bricolage of discontinuous narratives and mixed images. For this session, Patterson & Karpinski will discuss both personal cancer experiences and their associated politics. We invite participants to join us in making collages from found printed text and images. Readings may include: cancer journals; emails from friends and doctors; quotations from famous cancer survivors; citations from the popular scientific and medical lore on cancer; and statistical data. The event will engage multiple, and perhaps contradictory, discourses that construct the intimate and public dimensions of women’s encounters with cancer. We will create a visual archive of personal memories that speak of our bodily experiences, medicalization, pain, and empowerment, as well as our spiritual and intellectual transformations and activism.
Pam Patterson’s (PhD) research, performance and teaching
have focused on culture, disability and women and gender studies. She is
Associate Scholar , CWSE/OISE and Director, WIA projects and teaches at
University of Toronto and OCAD University. As a performance and visual artist
she has exhibited and performed internationally.
Eva C. Karpinski (PhD) teaches in the School of Women's
Studies at York University. She co-edited a special issue of Canadian Woman
Studies on Women and Cancer. Her book Borrowed Tongues: Life Writing,
Migration, and Translation is forthcoming in June 2012.