Artist Susanne Dietz invites you to discover and explore the unique stories and atmospheres of Ilford’s streets and neighbourhoods. Inspired by our current exhibition Ilford in focus: a street photography exploration, this playful session encourages storytelling through creative collage-making.

The workshop begins with a group discussion, inviting attendees to share reflections and stories about the streets they live on and the character of their neighbourhoods. This is followed by a hands-on creative session where participants will cut, layer, and assemble found materials, including magazines, newspapers, craft supplies, and photographs, to create vibrant, layered visual narratives

In a relaxed and inclusive setting, participants are encouraged to bring their own photos or materials to personalise their creations, while the artist will provide a wide range of resources. Together we will craft reimagined stories that bring the everyday life of Ilford’s community into focus.

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Susanne Dietz is an artist with an interdisciplinary practice that combines digital and analogue processes layering moving image, collage, sound, and performance. She works across visual arts and theatre.

She is interested in who creates history, and how memories are circulated from individual to collective perspectives. To what extent can the body be an archive of collective memory? In 2023, she was the artist-in-residence at the Norwich Institute of Healthy Ageing at East Anglia
University researching the connection between menopause and dementia. She has used the experience of hormonal decline to examine concepts of memory, ageism and dementia while exploring feminist and queer theory of menopause.

Susanne’s formative years in moving image making were shaped by being part of theatre collective Shunt, where she created video installations for immersive live performance events in abandoned spaces across London.

Since graduating from Goldsmiths MA Artists’ Film & Moving Image in 2018, she co-founded Ballpark, a moving image collective that produced a regular exhibition series called Reality Sandwiches.

Recent screening, exhibitions and theatre shows include Southwark Park Galleries, London Short Film Festival, SOHO Theatre, CURRENTS Santa Fe Media Festival/New Mexico, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Deptford X, The Barbican, and SET gallery Lewisham.