»A Common Collage« is a hands-on workshop that explores image-making as a democratic space of dialogue, participation, and shared imagination.
The workshop connects the Bauhaus tradition of experimental learning with the contemporary collage practice of Danish-Ukrainian artist Sergei Sviatchenko and his LESS principles – a method that encourages visual clarity, poetic thinking, and radical simplicity by working with a maximum of three elements.
Building on Sviatchenko’s teaching method Construction – Deconstruction – Reconstruction, participants are invited to engage directly with his original photographic series inspired by the Bauhaus, including »The Way of Seeing BAU«, as well as his Play Face process – where the human face becomes both a subject and a surface for transformation.
Just like the exhibition »A Common Room in a Changing World« invites us to participate in democratic dialogue, this workshop encourages participants to co-create visual conversations, using collage as a collective language.
At the historical Bauhaus, Johannes Itten, Josef Albers, and László Moholy-Nagy used simple paper cut-outs to explore form, rhythm and composition. Their idea was clear: creativity grows through experimentation, play and shared learning. Our workshop continues this legacy by activating collage as a social and reflective space – where people with different perspectives meet, create and reinterpret together.
Through short exercises and collaborative image-making, participants will:
• Explore visual communication as a democratic tool
• Work with Bauhaus-inspired material experiments
• Create collages based on the LESS method and the CDR process
• Transform individual fragments into shared meaning
The workshop is led by artist Sergei Sviatchenko and the team of the Skovgaard Museum in Viborg, Denmark. The Danish-Ukrainian artist Sergei Sviatchenko is one of todays most influential collage artist and we at the Danish Embassy are so happy to welcome him in Berlin.
All workshop participants are asked to bring five self-portraits (e.g., selfies or portraits) printed in black and white on A4 or A3 paper. This way, you can also become part of your work.
No artistic experience is required – only curiosity and the willingness to join a creative dialogue.
As source material for the workshop, participants will work with original collages by Sergei Sviatchenko from the series »The Way of Seeing BAU« and »Factory«, both created using the artist’s own photographic interpretations of Bauhaus building, Dessau and Peter Behrens’ AEG Turbine Factory, Berlin.
Foto: privat