Writing → Piece by Piece
MA Essay
MA Landscape Architecture, UCL Bartlett School of Architecture
Using Queer Collage Strategies for Landscape Design
A collection of images put together. Cut up, isolated, put together, torn apart, layered. What do they make together? A cohesive image full of scale variety, perspectives skewed. Themes, colours, patterns, and photos mingle in a counter-harmony to create a complex identity.
In my work, I have utilized collage to work with London’s Queer community as a response to the rapid closure of Queer spaces. (Salem, 2021) In the responses, I have hosted collage workshops allowing participants to imagine their Queer Space Utopia and exhibit the participant’s collages. Through these conversations and collage seances, I have started perceiving landscape and space interventions as forms of collage. This essay explores how collage can be used as a lens to queer landscape—both as reading existing landscape interventions through Queer collage lens and as imagining of future Queer space.
Collaging as a methodology offers a unique lens through which to explore the intersection of Queerness and design. Looking beyond its role as a visual form, collaging is a dynamic process that challenges normative narratives about design and re-constructs them in a way that challenges both societal and Architectural norms of presentation. (Minden, 2021)
In this essay, I identify key strategies from the process of collaging to be used as a gateway into collage thinking. Next, those identified strategies are used to dissect the meaning of existing landscape interventions—namely the works of landscape artists Nills Norman and sculptor Jean Shin. Further, I propose how collaging can be used as a valuable tool for designers to Queer their practice and imagine Queer futures. Through this essay, I will share short snippets from conversations I have recorded through my Collage practice about Queer Space Imagination.