Collage and Chance
What I particularly enjoy about collage is its suggestive power of chance. I try not to think too much about why certain printed images, illustrations, and photographs in newspapers and magazines appeal to me; I just tear them out and collect them. The process is hard to describe. While I don’t know exactly what I am looking for, the single pieces often appear like flashes of memory. Sometimes it is an evocative figure that attracts my attention. At other times, it is a colored contour, an object, or a piece of text that initiates my work. I tend to collect similar color schemes or shapes until they reach a certain quantity.
Occasionally, I instantly tear up a page and reassemble the pieces into a collage. The background is also of great importance: sometimes there is a sudden preference for a color, mode, or theme, while at other times I use printouts of photographs I took. Collage offers “complexity of thought and feeling, poetry and ambiguity in a mode of expression that is non-verbal, non-theoretical” (Mel Gooding).
Imagination and Choices
The importance I attribute to these paper fragments has something very intuitive and dreamlike — but also compulsive — about it. With some pieces there is a very clear idea of how and where to place them within the overall setting, such that no alternative remains. Yet the result often turns out to be completely different than imagined. Sometimes, after placing a piece or a cut-out in a certain location and then taking it away, there is a glaring emptiness, which reassures me that I have found the ‘right’ place.
However, I often spend a long time searching for the ‘right’ piece, for a special shape or a certain color. Imagination requires making choices, even though these choices seem limited and often leave one with fewer possibilities than one would think.
Interacting with Pre-existing Imagery and Empty Space
“What is it that collage actually does?” Yuval Etgar’s question evokes answers in abundance. Collage is about the transfiguration and ever-mutating recontextualization of the fragment. One must deal with boundaries that arise and gaps that close or open. Unfamiliar perspectives and unbridgeable juxtapositions are often created.
Above all, collage is a technique that interacts with pre-existing imagery and empty space, that questions the nature of representation, and that plays with different levels of reality — with imperfect expressions and interdependencies that complement and overlap each other. Collage is everywhere, it surrounds us.
A Metalanguage of the Visual
Rosalind Krauss called collage “a metalanguage of the visual”. With an attentiveness to detail and to what is leftover, it interferes with familiar contexts; it plays with different sizes and scales by using exaggerated or reduced forms. Collage involves unexpected encounters, “taking found images out of their original context and reintroducing them into a new one in order to generate new meanings that were previously latent, concealed or non-existent” (Yuval Etgar). Embracing absurdity, collage produces illogical combinations and scenes of fantasy, relational settings that emerge or dissolve. The pieces seem to enact something — familiar, uncanny, or both — when placed together in a kind of imaginary space or wordless vacuum.
Sometimes it takes weeks for the precise spot to emerge, the exact angle to appear; at other times, pieces of paper suddenly form a whole of some kind. In these instances, one does not know exactly what the whole consists of or where it came from. It is just there.
Bio
I have been making paper collages since the early 2010s. My work has appeared in publications such as Contemporary Collage Magazine, in the form of book covers for Franco Cesati Editore and ICI Berlin Press, and in print media for Studio Bens. Born in Berlin, I moved to Rome to study literature before receiving my master’s degree from Freie Universität Berlin and my PhD from TU Darmstadt.
My creative vision is deeply connected with my research interests and the constant moving between disciplines and topics. I have been interested in the historical avant-gardes, in unfinished artworks, and in themes of waiting, lists, failure, and make-believe. I curated several exhibitions at the ICI Berlin, including The Waiting Room (with Cristina Baldacci, Francesco Giusti and Clio Nicastro), Untimely Now, Unfinished, Clair obscur, and Along the Lines, as well as Je suis parti faire un tour at KunstRaum Ko in Berlin, Mon monde est l’ambiguïté at the Musée de l’Échevinage, and L’après-midi de ma vie at L’Abbaye aux Dames in Saintes, France.
While I have always been interested in art, the making of art came later, at a stage in my life where I experimented with different forms, such as sculpture and photography. Collage has had the most lasting effect on me. I am a member of a Collage Collective in Berlin-Friedrichshain.