(Workshop) Building community: Merging past and present

Alessia Zinnari is an interdisciplinary scholar with specialism in Italian, Comparative Literature, Gender Studies and Visual Culture Studies. She uses feminist methodologies to explore the intersections between power, self-representation, the body, and trauma in modern and contemporary literature and art. She has published on Italian poet Alda Merini and English Surrealist Leonora Carrington, and she is now working on a monograph that compares the two artists and their use of words and images to overcome their experiences of illness and violence. Alessia also has a keen interest in community engagement and social justice through research and art, and, together with artist Alex Withey, has developed the participatory art project CAMERA, which engages communities in artmaking. Her latest publication is the book chapter ”“My stomach was the mirror of the earth”: An Ecofeminist Reading of Leonora Carrington’s Memoir of Illness, Down Below” in Female Surrealist Artists and Mental Illness (MUP, 2026). 

Artist and educator Alex Withey, born in Helsinki in 1988, works across photography, installation, and participatory workshops, and is currently Photography Technician at the Glasgow School of Art. His interdisciplinary practice explores the life of images and the assumptions around photographic truth and representation. His recent project gathers images from Mexico City’s urban fabric, where built and natural environments touch, press against, and blur into one another. The city is reimagined outside linear time, as both remembered future and unresolved past. In these works, fragmented landscapes emerge: veiled, partially hidden, emptied of bodies yet dense with traces of intervention, communication, and presence. Monumental and minute details appear on the same plane. Moving from screen to acetate, the images are transformed thro