Décollage is the opposite of collage — not the act of adding, but of removing.
In the streets of post-war France and Italy, artists like Mimmo Rotella and Raymond Hains began to tear down layers of commercial posters from public walls. What emerged were raw, accidental compositions: ripped surfaces, exposed layers, fragments of slogans and images meant to sell something, now stripped of their message and turned into something else.
Working with poster material in Berlin today feels like a continuation of that tradition, though shaped by our own surroundings. The source is the same: torn advertising posters, collected from public spaces. Often, several layers are still glued together — soaked in water, we peel them apart slowly, revealing what lies underneath. It feels like excavation. Like archaeology.
What appears are traces: distorted faces, faded colours, old typefaces, fragments of forgotten campaigns. These leftovers carry their own kind of poetry — accidental, unspectacular, but full of tension. The process has no rules. We follow the material, its textures and surprises. As André Breton once wrote about décollage in 1938, it's about "tearing off a poster in places to reveal, piece by piece, the posters beneath it — and playing with the strange or disorienting effect of the whole."
It’s a way of working that gives meaning to what was meant to be temporary. A quiet resistance to the noise of consumer images.
Décollage is the opposite of collage — not the act of adding, but of removing.
In the streets of post-war France and Italy, artists like Mimmo Rotella and Raymond Hains began to tear down layers of commercial posters from public walls. What emerged were raw, accidental compositions: ripped surfaces, exposed layers, fragments of slogans and images meant to sell something, now stripped of their message and turned into something else.
Working with poster material in Berlin today feels like a continuation of that tradition, though shaped by our own surroundings. The source is the same: torn advertising posters, collected from public spaces. Often, several layers are still glued together — soaked in water, we peel them apart slowly, revealing what lies underneath. It feels like excavation. Like archaeology.
What appears are traces: distorted faces, faded colours, old typefaces, fragments of forgotten campaigns. These leftovers carry their own kind of poetry — accidental, unspectacular, but full of tension. The process has no rules. We follow the material, its textures and surprises. As André Breton once wrote about décollage in 1938, it's about "tearing off a poster in places to reveal, piece by piece, the posters beneath it — and playing with the strange or disorienting effect of the whole."
It’s a way of working that gives meaning to what was meant to be temporary. A quiet resistance to the noise of consumer images.
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