Sam Jacob: On Collage – Talk, Workshop & Exhibition, 6–8 February 2026
In February, Drawing Matter is welcoming architect Sam Jacob to the archive for a series of public programme events exploring collage as a tool for design.
Talk: Sam Jacob on Collage
Friday 6 February
18.00–20.00
Doors open at 18.00; talk begins at 18.30
Purchase tickets here
Collage was used by the radical architects of the 1960s and 70s both as a tool for proposition and critique. Groups like Superstudio and Archigram cut up magazines and reassembled dislocated things and figures into drawings. In part, their ideas needed collage in order to work; print culture provided them with material, and collage enabled them to physically engage with the very substance of mass media. Choosing, cutting-up, and reassembling images allowed these architects, just as Pop Artists had shown, to work in dialogue with popular culture in variously groovy surrealist, or provocative ways.
For us, marinated in digital images, this notion of mass media might seem quaint. So too the laborious process of scouring magazines for the right image, and the scalpel and Cow Gum skills required. We swim in a world of images, most of them coming to us already out of context. With tools like Google Images and Photoshop, we can find things and process them instantly. We have AI images, which are, in some ways, a form of collage—all of visual history is sliced-up into pixel-sized pieces and reassembled in new forms. It’s both all too much and all too easy. – Sam Jacob
Collage Workshop
Saturday 7 February
11.00–16.00
Book a place here
This workshop takes us back. It takes us into a mythical place: Superstudio’s collage chest, which is now part of Drawing Matter’s collection. The workshop is an archaeology of Pop-architecture, a way to look closely at Superstudio’s material and sources, and at the media landscape they were both co-opting and objecting to.
During the workshop, we will be opening up the collage chest and rifling through its drawers, which are stuffed full of pages cut and ripped from magazines by the radical collective during the 1960s and 70s to make their legendary collages. We will use reproductions of this material, in conjunction with other Drawing Matter drawings, to make our own physical collages—an anachronistic method, using scissors and glue, in a digital age. This will allow us to engage creatively with visual culture of the past and the present. By the end of the session, we will have made a set of new images—of what, who knows… the collages Superstudio never made?
The workshop is a speculative reenactment. The equivalent of writing with Shakespeare’s quill, typing on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s typewriter, or dancing in Margot Fonteyn’s tutu. In part a reenactment, a way of inhabiting cultural ghosts and feeling strange sensations that emerge in this kind of proximity to the past. As they used to say on Stars in Their Eyes: ‘Tonight, Matthew, I’m going to be Superstudio’.
Exhibition
Sunday 8 February
12.00–17.00
Free and open to all
On Sunday 8 February, the archive will be open for an informal exhibition of collages made during Sam’s workshop. The exhibition will also include examples of collage from the collection by architects, designers and artists, such as Alison and Peter Smithson, Walter Pichler, Haus Rücker, Mies van der Rohe, Robert Smithson, OMA, and Eva Jiřičná.
Drawing Matter’s public programme offers the public opportunities to experience our drawings collection, which is usually only open to researchers by appointment and for student/practice workshops. Events take the form of temporary exhibitions, talks at the archive, and workshops.
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