Maevia Griffiths
HUD Doctoral Researcher
The University of Copenhagen
A pack of advertisements from NETO supermarket, two Danish design books, last week’s newspapers, a cultural booklet, flyers, an old Mickey Mouse comic book, 10 tubes of glue, 7 pairs of scissors and a class of 40 political science Masters and Bachelor students, slightly confused at 8 AM on a cloudy autumn Monday morning in Copenhagen.
In the fall of 2024, I taught a class at the University of Copenhagen in International Relations called “Filmmaking, Activism and Social Impact in International Relations” and I organised a workshop for students called “Collaging Theory into Practice with Net Found Footage”, co-taught with filmmaker and assistant professor Nathalie Berger from the School of Art and Design (HEAD) of Geneva, Switzerland.
A week earlier, I had asked my students to bring their own magazine, a tube of glue and scissors – they indeed looked at me with a glare that seemed to say, “we are not in kindergarten anymore – this is university!”. While this hands-on form of workshop is surely uncommon at the university level in Political Sciences, the whole course was intended to draw the connections between critical thinking and making, through the practice of filmmaking and aesthetic knowledge production. While I had a moment of hesitation about students potentially refusing to take part in the activity, I was beautifully surprised otherwise, and all, even the older – more confident – MA students, took part in the collaging workshop with eagerness and attentive concentration. The students were asked to pick one emotion and from the magazines and books available and to make a collage that brought together different visuals and thoughts towards the representation of that emotion. The idea was then to work with this same process of assembling different concepts visually through what is called Net Found Footage. A filmmaking method which uses only images already available on the Net, and re-creating meaning in a “détourné”(diverted) manner.
Collage emerged in the early 20th century through the radical experiments of the Dada movement. Artists like Hannah Höch and Max Ernst sought to resist the logic of war, nationalism, and bourgeois art by tearing apart visual conventions and thus, the status quo. They assembled fragments – newspaper clippings, advertising, images from popular culture – into compositions that challenged notions of coherence, authority, and hierarchy. As Max Ernst famously stated, collage is “the meeting of two distant realities on a plane foreign to them both.” Collage thus was, from the beginning, as much of an aesthetic as a political method. It aimed at resisting what counted as being art and rather valorising the absurdities and messiness of modern realities. The ethos of rupture and recombination of collage-thinking has thus been used in numerous practices and theories, such as in feminist theory, international relations, and digital culture – a way of bringing together and making sense of distant fragmented realities in a new visual and political field.
Going back to International Relations (IR), many authors have experimented with collage as a method that disrupts the disciplinary boundaries of IR, such as Christine Sylvester1Sylvester, C. (2005). The art of war/the war question in (feminist) IR. Millennium, 33(3), 855-878., Saara Särmä2Särmä, S. (2019). Collage as an empowering art-based feminist method for IR. In Critical Methods for the Study of World Politics (pp. 289-305). Routledge. and Anna Leander.3Leander, A. (2019). Sticky security: the collages of tracking device advertising. European Journal of International Security, 4(3), 322-344. Merging the qualities of collaging to IR, such as in the entanglements between war, art, and feminism, through the visual culture of nuclear proliferation or looking at “sticky” politics of the security collage, all these studies place collaging as a tool and a means to visibilise what is typically overlooked. Collage juxtaposes images, objects, and meanings not to resolve them, but to allow contradiction and proximity to generate new thought. Sylvester draws attention to how we, as researchers and spectators, are never outside the frame:
We cannot approach the rug or touch it without obviously collaging ourselves to it, without adding our heterogeneous elements outside war to the war picture.4Sylvester, C. (2005). The art of war/the war question in (feminist) IR. Millennium, 33(3), 878.
Collage reveals that subjectivity is not an obstacle to knowledge, but inherently part of its condition. This approach builds on what art historian Brandon Taylor identifies as the “grey zone” of collage: a space between utopian optimism and the material residues of modernity.5Taylor, B. (2004). Collage: The making of modern art. Thames & Hudson. Those residues – discarded images, scraps of data, emotional leftovers – become the raw materials through which one can reconstruct narratives and think otherwise about global politics. Thereby, according to Sylvester, collage enables us to address certain myopias regarding art, war, gender and IR, to sketch out new forms of relationality. Additionally, Särmä’s notion of “collage-thinking” opens a space for interdisciplinary dialogue, challenging rigid frameworks and encouraging playful, affective, and embodied engagements such as laughter and or paying attention to visual overlapping details which interact, challenging passive consumption and becoming a mode of analysis.
Collage thus is about thinking with images, not just about them, allowing us to turn away from “high data” and elite discourse towards “low data” such as pop culture, the banal aesthetics of everyday life and digital realities to reinvent meaning out of seemingly isolated data.6Särmä, S. (2019). Collage as an empowering art-based feminist method for IR. In Critical Methods for the Study of World Politics (pp. 289-305). Routledge. Turning to the words of Tim Ingold “as practitioners, the builder, the gardener, the cook, the alchemist and the painter are not so much imposing form on matter as bringing together diverse materials and combining or redirecting their flow in the anticipation of what might emerge.”7Ingold, T. (2010). The textility of making. Cambridge journal of economics, 34(1), 94.
As Nathalie Berger has highlighted during the workshop, collage also functions as a tool for “détournement”, a tactical re-signification that destabilizes dominant meanings and allows new readings to emerge. This was then contextualised in the age of the internet, where people constantly share, remix, and reinterpret content, making collage a powerful site of intervention.
After going over every student’s brilliant paper collage; made with humour, critical thinking and aesthetic reflection, we left the glue and the scissors for our film editing program.
As such, the second part of the workshop consisted of using this collage logic in filmmaking through Net Found Footage – a filmmaking method where artists and researchers use video fragments from the web to assemble visual essays. Like collage, Net Found Footage is about recombination. It resists linear storytelling and invites juxtaposition, inviting viewers into the act of interpretation: theory through editing and montage, analysis through aesthetic affective frames.
When remixing web images, this access comes with ethical responsibility, and one must question: who is being seen by whom? What meanings are being assigned, and at what cost? This has profound implications for collage and Net Found Footage practices and entails risks, particularly around ethics of data usage, notions of gaze dynamics, and the politics of representation.
The gaze, a key theoretical frame for thinking about visuality and ethics reminds us that relations of spectatorship are always loaded with power. From the Mulveyan male gaze theories in cinema to bell hooks’ concept of the oppositional gaze as resistance to the misrepresentation of women of colour in popular culture, the gaze remains an asymmetrical force, often mobilized as instruments of control. As theorized by Michel Foucault, Jeremy Bentham, and others, notions such as the panoptic gaze disciplines behaviour, rendering the subject complicit in their own monitoring. As such, Foucault states “the gaze that sees is a gaze that dominates.”8Foucault, M. (2002). The birth of the clinic. Routledge.
In the context of digital culture, this panoptic logic is deeply entrenched. Surveillance cameras, social media platforms, and biometric technologies extend the gaze into every corner of life. Nevertheless, it is not only imposed upon us. As Mark Andrejevic shows, surveillance is also participatory: people willingly upload their lives online, being through social media, reality TV, livestreams etc. The self becomes a performance under the gaze of imagined audiences, curated for visibility, and disciplined through likes, metrics, and algorithms.9Andrejevic, M. (2011). ‘Securitainment’in the post-9/11 era. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 25(02), 165-175.; Andrejevic, M. (2002). The work of being watched: Interactive media and the exploitation of self-disclosure. Critical studies in media communication, 19(2), 230-248.
This connects to notions of the algorithmic gaze, where the observer dynamic shifts from the human to the machine. Safiya Umoja Noble, in Algorithms of Oppression, shows how search engines reproduce racial and gender biases, reinforcing dangerous stereotypes and discourses. As such, algorithms shape what we see and not, determining which images are visible, prioritised and concealed, reproducing certain scopic dynamics of power.
Thus, a practice such as Net Found Footage requires sensitive ethical considerations when projecting new meaning onto someone else’s image, as it can lead to misrepresentation, dehumanization, and/or retraumatization. Legal concerns also emerge regarding questions of copyright, data ownership, and consent. Digital collaging must navigate these grey zones carefully, especially when it operates in public or institutional contexts, by making sure that “détournement” is applied – as in the meaning of the footage ought to be changed for the footage to be legally used without explicit copyright agreements by the author of the image.
As such, every student was required to create their own found footage exercise by sourcing existing online content on a topic of their choice. Through this, they learned to manipulate and re-edit these clips to construct new narratives that echoed the theoretical frameworks discussed in class. Impressive visual and creative political products emerged. This theoretical and practical collaging framework was then re-used in other classes and assignments by many students – continuing to put into practice the making is thinking logic.
This workshop; all the way from the theory, to the paper cutting and glueing process, to the Net Found Footage film workshop, enabled to enact the process of collaging ‘un-imagined’ narratives, mirroring the complex and often contradictory nature of global political landscapes – central to IR and Political Sciences.
From this, many remarkable projects emerged, but I would like to share one that includes collaging in a specific creative method by a group of three students: Hanne, Paula and Cecilie.
Wings, Clipped.
Cecilie Hærvig, Hanne Solbø, and Paula Boden
The experience of searching for refuge and applying for asylum leaves people behind, in a limbo, in a situation where time is delicate. Which also makes it too delicate to ask about. Maybe even impossible. Because how do you ask someone what it feels like to wait, when waiting is embedded in everything else? When it’s not a deliberate self-chosen moment, a timeout or a ‘just’ a phase, but an inherent part of the everyday?
Instead of asking about how the ‘waiting around’ in asylum centres feels like, we invited the quiet things, the materials and feelings that fill up this time. We looked at how the days at Sjælsmark Deportation Centre in Northern Copenhagen blur together, how a suitcase lays packed on an empty bed – just in case –, how a walk through the same hallway several times a day feels, how the toothbrush stays in the window, left behind. Collaging opened the emotional sphere, gave us but also the protagonists of the film Wings, Clipped access to discuss these images and thoughts.
Before reading further, you can watch the film below (password: WingsClippedDoc.):
In the documentary film Wings, Clipped, we arrange a collaging workshop with a couple of the residents at Sjælsmark Deportation Centre, a bit north of Copenhagen. The protagonists of the film are Muhammad and Achmed, two young men with their own packed history and experiences of coming to Denmark in the first place. We, as white European female filmmakers, don’t share the lived experiences of Muhammad and Achmed – our positionality however allowed us to share our privilege of going to university, visiting the filmmaking class in IR and to creatively engage with humanising elements as well as with an emotional access to and understanding of migration. We knew Muhammad and Achmed from our volunteering sessions with the Ungdommens Røde Kors, so we already had some level of built trust among us. However, we were aware that sharing such personal insights and stories can place them in a vulnerable and unsafe position. We therefore decided to anonymise both protagonists, to prevent negative consequences.
With the film, we aimed to contribute something that did not flatten experience into explanation. Something that did not narrate over, but gave space for feelings and emotions.
Collaging as a tool in IR filmmaking itself but also as an actual scissors-newspapers-poster process became a way in: A way to collaborate, to watch, listen and ask, without the urge of everything must make sense. In our case, it is nothing fancy – just scissors, glue, old magazines. The process of Muhammad and Achmed sitting there around the table, choosing what pictures fit their emotional inner lives, and then to merge all of that onto one empty poster made space for things that didn’t fit into clear outspoken answers. When we invited Muhammad to make a collage about how he felt, he pointed to a skeleton and said, “That’s me when I don’t eat,” and then laughed. He continued by pointing to an image of the Statue of Liberty: “This is my future… maybe,” he smiled. There was something about the way he said it. Not heavy or pitiful, but just very honest and ultimately hopeful. A familiar image, a few words, and suddenly we’re talking about food, freedom, the future.
Collaging became its own kind of conversation, but one that goes above language. A space where pasts, fears, dreams could sit next to each other without the need to line them up. The art and tool of collaging can be valuable in moments where language becomes a barrier – where emotions and thoughts tied to one’s experience are so intricate and intimate, that, especially if English is not your mother tongue, language would complicate the communication. Collaging offers a bridge beyond words, a way to express what written or spoken language cannot contain. On top, in our collaging workshop it was especially remarkable that all magazines were in German. Thus, it was the power of the image, the imagination, the imaginable, rather than the written words.
In the case of Muhammad and Ahmed as protagonists in the film and of their own narrative, we see how they step into a space of playfulness and creativity, building their collages piece by piece. As they cut and arrange images, they simultaneously reflect on what these fragments represent – the echoes of their emotions, the way both physical and emotional limbo shape their sense of reality. Their actual hands-on crafting of their own collages simultaneously makes them the narrators of their own experiences, real fears, but also hopes and desires.
The film we made, Wings, Clipped, is a collection of moments. It is not about migration statistics or strict asylum policies. It’s not a classic document nor a policy analysis. Rather, it is about waiting, the politics of stealing time. The kind of waiting that does not announce itself but shows in small things. The kind that sits in the way the people we met invited us into their private space, offered us coffee, how they make their bed, in the post-it notes with English words on it and that endlessly repeat themselves on the wall, in a chair that for a brief moment turns into a Mercedes. These scenes are not metaphors, but testimonies. These things don’t need translating, they just need to be seen and be assembled, like a collage.
Collaging is a tool of collaboration. Instead of us, the filmmakers, deciding every inch of the film and the dramaturgy, Muhammad and Achmed told more through their collages as they might have in an actual on-camera guided interview. We therefore decided to engage their collages in the post-production and editing of the film. The film as collage itself became vivid by using the composed collaging elements by Muhammad and Achmed as recurring details in the film – such as the white seagull. Another means of collaging was to implement further symbols, among others Muhmmad’s humorous behaviour while he was crafting – him ‘driving the Mercedes’. We looked closer at how physical objects can serve as so-called ‘boundary objects’, in our case objects that others can identify with and objects that can symbolise meaning. For example, the recurring image but also sound of the seagull can be interpreted as hope or as the stark contrast between a flying bird and the constrained waiting around. The recurring element of the car – us driving to Sjælsmark, Muhammad driving his Mercedes while sitting on a chair, and in the end us leaving Sjælsmark behind – builds the bridge between our very different realities in life. The ‘boundary objects’ mediate meaning between us, the researchers, Muhammad and Achmed as the subjects, and ultimately, you, the audience.
Collaging is immediate. It helped us but also the protagonists navigate what didn’t fit into a linear and spoken narrative. It moved us beyond linguistics and into something that felt more like real life – messy, emotional, in-between, shared. It showed time not as something to measure, but something to feel and act within.
In Wings, Clipped, the collage is both: in the film and of the film. The collages in the film are made by Muhammad and Achmed, the film itself is our filmmakers own collage. That line is important. Because this project wasn’t just about documenting something. It was about building something together. We brought the magazines, glue and camera – and of course our researcher’s eye through the camera –, while Muhammad and Achmed brought their imagination, meanings, emotions and humour. Through the process and action of tearing apart a certain image from a magazine it allows for reconstruction of a narrative and creates new possible understandings of their situations. In the end the film is a product of our interpretation. However, the interpretations by Muhammad and Achmed of their own collages are captured through the camera and microphones, partly also through the camera lens of a friend of Muhammad. The collages made in Sjælsmark that day can be seen as a chain of communication: from first encounters, to reflections, to interpretations and finally to recurring elements and symbolism in the film itself.
Collaging as a tool in IR can be valuable. It is a way to move beyond linguistics, an effort to build trust and to implement an eye-to-eye level of communication between the researchers and the subjects of research. Collaging brings emotions to life, portrays inner livelihoods that often go overlooked by traditional IR research. It can serve as an alternative method to collaboratively engage in research, to flatten hierarchies and to eventually take a step back from the pre-written Western, dehumanising and victimising narrative. To watch and learn from the protagonists’ collages, to accept that the researchers’ and filmmakers’ pre-formed ideas and inherent biases are not necessarily what the people most affected by the power dynamics in international politics feel, see and want.
Of course Wings, Clipped has its own limitations. The reflexive process could have been even more inclusive, for example through the inclusion of Muhammad and Achmed in the final editing process or through engaging FLINTA* asylum seekers from Sjælsmark in the collaging workshop. What can be concluded however is that collaging as a tool in IR is not only for kindergarteners, it is a tool to open space for an emotional exchange of inner thoughts, dreams, hopes and fears that are embedded in the discriminative nature of Western migration management – and therefore crucial to examine sensitively from an IR perspective and through a documentary camera lens.