NEW PRIMARIES: critical foundations for practice-based research
DEN/dwelling: Foraging, Found Objects, Assemblage
The Creative School Catalyst Summer Institute 2026, facilitated by Paola Poletto and Deanna Armenti
Material Exploration. (2025). Photo: Paola Poletto
Tuesday, August 11 to Thursday, August 13, 2026
10 am - 4 pm
The Catalyst, 80 Gould Street
吃瓜直播
No fees for application or successful applicants. All applicants will receive notification within one week of their submission. Rolling deadline until all spots filled.
The Creative School Catalyst Summer Institute 2026 will take place Tuesday, August 11 to Thursday, August 13, 2026 and will be facilitated by artists and MDI PhD candidates Paola Poletto and Deanna Armenti. Titled DEN/dwelling, the 3-day workshop proposes Foraging, Found Objects, and Assemblage as a set of foundational elements for collaborative research-creation. This pedagogical and discursive framework emerges from Poletto and Armenti's work in the context of The Creative School鈥檚 Media & Design Innovation program and seeks participation from graduate students, undergraduates considering a masters degree, and professionals in the visual arts and cultural production with an interest in critical approaches to collaborative making. Those who prioritize and appreciate different points of views, enjoy making while discussing, and who value intergenerational learning will benefit most from this type of Summer Institute.
Dwelling as Collaborative Research centres foraging, found objects, and assemblage as research-creation methodology. This topic for the Summer Institute is a synergy between Deanna鈥檚 Major comprehensive exam topic - Futurity from an Ecological lens - and Research-creation minor. Escobar (2024) suggests ontological slippages that keep us divided and a possible factor as to why our movements towards collective liberation have often failed. Through the lens of Kimmerer鈥檚 (2013) honourable harvest, we will explore how the other-than-human world are also co-colloborators in arts/research practices, breaking down dualisms like Nature/Culture and Mind/Body. Haraway (2013) sees SF - speculative fiction, speculative fabulation, speculative feminism, science fiction, and string figures - as 鈥�...sensual trans-ing, and interstitial jointings鈥� (Haraway, 2013, pg. 2-3). Romano (2022) expands on this, connecting ecology to research-creation through More-than-Making as an ecology of practices which happens at the interstices of making and thinking. Building on this, Deanna鈥檚 comprehensive exams posited that interstitial spaces in writing and making, inspired by ecosystem interstitiality, are emergent places of collaboration, where we can acknowledge the multiplicity of our relations to each other and the other-than-human world.
DEN/dwelling in Progress. (2026). Photo: Deanna Armenti
Paola explored research methods that combined the auto-theory approach based on her professional museum experience and artist-curator practice with photo theory techniques that invite participants to share ideas and motivations by looking at photographs together. This second method was inspired by the work of Jo Spence and 1960 - 1980鈥檚 feminist and activist approaches toward both self inquiry and collectivizing/unionizing, and photo making 鈥� The Jo Spence Memorial Archive is housed in The Image Centre Collection at TMU. Added to these approaches is the 1980s feminist practice of affidamento, or entrustment, developed in Italy by women who celebrated and leveraged their varying knowledges across generational and ontological divides. This work has been recently taken up by scholars Helena Reckitt (2018) and Gabby Moser (2023). We acknowledge it as a model with which we have been making our DEN/dwelling. With a generational mix and convergent areas of interest, we employ these various approaches as essential to the collaborative approach to research-creation.
Schedule + Themes
Proposed Schedule + Themes:
Participants will gather as a collective at TMU鈥檚 Catalyst to make and discuss ideas inspired by a selection of readings, an art installation, and field trips.
DAY 1: Foraging: 鈥淭he Honorable Harvest鈥� by Robin Wall Kimmerer will introduce us to ethical foraging practices and will be followed by a field outing to Tommy Thompson Park | Leslie Street Spit.
DAY 2: Found Objects: Spending time with our foraged matter, personal archives and our making from Day 1 as we consider the role of self-representation within the collective through looking together as method.
DAY 3: Assemblage: How do we transition DEN/dwelling to moving forward together? Questions about presentation and representation are transformed into action through our collective making and community building.
吃瓜直播 the Artists
Paola Poletto (left) and Deanna Armenti (right)
Paola Poletto is an arts professional and artist-curator of design, craft, new media and visual art. She has produced exhibitions and public programs in performance and contemporary mixed media; designed educational and professional development workshops within the museums, civic engagement / community development, and international diplomacy fields; and steered curatorial and educational teams to achieve their organization's strategic plans. Paola has presented best practices at international conferences and fairs, published on art and museum education in peer-reviewed journals, and edited several books ranging from graphic poetry and public art to urban design and architecture. Paola's doctoral research looks at what it means and feels like to be an artist/arts worker in a museum today. It includes first-person interviews with artists who work in museums as well as mixed-media research presented over a series of talks, exhibitions and residencies. Most recently, her photographic project has travelled to Arquetopia Foundation, Mexico (2025), the Ontario College of Art and Design and Gladstone House, Toronto (2026). Paola is a member of the Photography Network and the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art (CIMAM).
Deanna Armenti (Fae/Faer, She/Her) is a Queer Faegender poet, zine creator, and interdisciplinary textile artist and researcher. Deanna is a PhD candidate at 吃瓜直播 (TMU) in the Media and Design Innovation program. She weaves, crochets, knits, sews, does leather work, and lost-wax casting. Her textile work is focused on natural fibres and incorporates foraged material as co-collaborators. Deanna鈥檚 Research-creation focused arts practice sits at the intersection of Ecology, Folklore, and Gender Studies. Her work queries the decentering of Anthropocentric gender through the lens of her Gender Expansive experience as Faegender. Inspired by kin centric ecologies, Deanna鈥檚 work foregrounds ontological multiplicity in exploration of how gender can align with the ontology of other-than-human beings (e.g. plants, animals, vital matters) as well as how time, place, aesthetic, and even story structure - such as fable or 鈥楩ae-ble鈥� - are also gender ontologies.