Alsdorf Project: The Everyday Marvellous

Alsdorf is the dream-other of Salford — a city reimagined through Surrealist practice. Developed at Loaves and Fishes, a Salford mental-health charity, The Everyday Marvellous explored how collaborative Surrealist methods might serve as creative therapy. 

Over six weeks, participants created alter-egos through chance and analogy, wrote automatically, drew and collaged intuitively, and built a collective fiction — Alsdorf: A Collaborative Novel (Hesterglock Press, 2023). The project tested how constraint-based Surrealist techniques—automatism, collage, and chance—could function as catalysts for psychic renewal and social connection.

Situated between research and community practice, Alsdorf proposes a heterotopian model of group therapy where creativity operates as desiring production rather than self-expression: a space in which identity becomes a fluid assemblage, shaped through play, surprise, and shared imaginative energy.

Read more about the publication at Hesterglock Press →

See also here a brief review.