Once Upon a Time

In this artistic research, I approached collage as a therapeutic and methodological tool rather than solely as an art form. I worked with its potential to hold fragmentation, rupture, and reconstruction—both metaphorically and materially. As part of the project, I organised a series of workshops with Ukrainian children who had experienced displacement. Collage became a shared language through which fragmented personal histories could be assembled, negotiated, and reimagined. Through the combination of storytelling and visual composition, I explored collage as a means of confronting painful memories while fostering processes of care, resilience, and emotional articulation. Sharing the experience of displacement with the children I worked with, my position was shaped by lived memory and self-reflection, situating the research between facilitation and personal reassembly of identity. The project culminated in a book-zine that brings together narrative, collage, and illustration. An alter ego functions as a mediating figure, allowing inner thoughts, emotions, and unresolved experiences to be articulated indirectly. The publication operates both as an outcome of the workshops and as a personal archive, reflecting on collage as a practice of healing, translation, and continuity in conditions shaped by loss and displacement. Keywords: artistic research, post-conflict, collage, storytelling, collaborative storytelling, refugees, displacement, trauma, PTSD, resilience, embodied memory, belonging, childhood, healing, autotheory, autofiction, critical fabulation, art therapy, trauma-informed art practice, practice-based research, workshop, zine, illustration, identity, affect theory, psychoanalysis, semiotics