LESS Festival of Contemporary Collage,
Melbourne, Australia + Viborg, Denmark, 2021-22
Curated by Karen ann Donnachie, Andy Simionato & Sergei Sviatchenko.
Part of UNESCO Creative Cities
LESS is the first festival of contemporary collage in the world. For the second edition of LESS, two UNESCO cities are connected through collage.
Throughout 2021 new-media artists Karen ann Donnachie, Andy Simionato and Sergei Sviatchenko, held parallel workshops in Viborg and Melbourne, working with participants from their local communities and schools.
With LESS Akademie in Viborg and LESS & More: Post-Digital Collage studio c/o RMIT School of Design, students learned to re-imagine an art and design practice through the lens of collage.
Sviatchenko, Donnachie & Simionato have generated original works of computational and analogue collage, a series of immersive exhibitions, and collaborative publications, which explore Viborg, Denmark, Melbourne, Australia, and the metaverses between.
Viborg and Melbourne collaged cities
Viborg and Melbourne collaged cities
Viborg and Melbourne collaged cities
Viborg and Melbourne collaged cities
The Collage Garden in VR
The Collage Garden in VR
The Open Air Collage Garden in Viborg
The Open Air Collage Garden in Viborg
What resulted was a new landscape populated by the interwoven realities of the two cities, their architecture and nature, recombined through the machine.
Sviatchenko, Donnachie & Simionato shared photographs of their cities and created collages of these photographs. Through a series of parallel workshops in the two cities, during a year of strict lockdowns, the artists collaborated with local students and participants to remix each others’ works.
In each city the artists brought together participants, students and the public, in a series of workshops and activities with the common goal of re-imagining a new space which reconciles both the splintered realities of our time, and the need to recombine and interweave and grow.
The Collage-garden
These collage works were then placed into both an open-air collage-garden, in the city of Viborg, as well as a virtual 3d landscape which can be freely explored with an Internet browser or through a VR headset. With the dynamic generation of the garden re-occuring at each reload, new juxtapositions and collaged sculptures are made, the algorithm becomes another collage artist in the process.
ENTER The Collage GardenSergei Sviatchenko with students @ LESS Akademie, Viborg
Sergei Sviatchenko with students @ LESS Akademie, Viborg
Student Works from LESS & More Studio @ RMIT with Karen ann Donnachie & Andy Simionato
Student Works from LESS & More Studio @ RMIT with Karen ann Donnachie & Andy Simionato
Student Works from LESS & More Studio @ RMIT with Karen ann Donnachie & Andy Simionato
Student works from LESS Akademie, Viborg
Student works from LESS Akademie, Viborg
Student works from LESS Akademie, Viborg
Collage Garden Model, LESS Akademie, Viborg
Collage...is a true reflection of the world we live in today...[it] is all about the recycling, reinterpretation and reprocessing of our collective past, present and future.
—Gallagher, 2011
From the early 20th Century, through the work of Picasso, Braque, Hannah Hoch, Eileen Agar with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements, collage has been a new medium for critical, irreverent and rhetorical image making. In the one hundred years of the medium, collage has developed into a salient visual language reflecting our fragmented image-saturated environment, and a potent voice for social, political, personal and global concerns.
Through LESS Education Workshops and studios around the world, students learn collage history and contemporary techniques in analogue and post-digital collage.
The severe reductiveness of Sviatchenko’s interventions sets them apart...The swift cuts that Sviatchenko makes into his source pictures give them angular new outlines that can verge on abstraction. His strangely dislocated and sometimes otherworldly inventions offer moments of unexpected balance and repose in the turbulent image-stream.
— Rick Poynor, from the book ‘Sergei Sviatchenko: Collages’, 2014
Contemporary artist Sergei Sviatchenko has developed a method of collage by which just three elements are juxtaposed. By restricting the elements, a discipline emerges in the work.
Sergei asks his students to repeatedly hold their hand in front of their face as they work, to see 'less' before looking back at the work.