Abstract
This thesis seeks to contextualise the approaches of my enquiry into the social life and political potential of collage. In an A-Z glossary format of 26 entries, the thesis explores my experiments with collage-making as the depiction and practice of collectivity and as a methodology of resisting heteropatriarchal and capitalist imperatives. Among the research projects and experimental artworks undertaken in the candidacy period are No Human Being Is Illegal (in all our glory), produced for the 19th Biennale of Sydney; Kampung Kolase, a collage-village in Bandung, Indonesia; the community collage-graffiti work Flowra, the ACT UP memorial collage Floral Clock; an animated collage LYING WOMEN; a suite of still, analogue collage works titled The Venus Variations, an installation against the representation of rape in high art called By The Skin Of Her Teeth, and a number of collage workshops facilitated as laboratories to test the research questions posited here. The thesis does not reach standard closure but develops the conclusion across its multivalent approaches that the tasks set by the research questions demand ongoing and ensemble efforts.