Collage involves gestures related to sculpture. Starting from pre-existing material - archives of all kinds, printed images, text, objects and raw materials - artists decontextualize, manipulate, remove and cut out fragments of this material. These fragments are assembled in a variety of ways. Glued, stapled or sewn together, the materials are brought together by a grafting gesture that gives rise to monstrous images or objects. The collage is a monster body, a political body. «Order crushes the machines of desire that move corporality. Power manages, in an induced but permanent way, the intimate and the management of the person.» 1
The work resulting from collage thus implies a strangeness, an anomaly, a malformation, a difference provoked by a refusal to conform, a desire to make visible, to show, that which disturbs, deforms, disfigures and transforms. Through collage, modern and contemporary artists dissect and deconstruct pre-existing materials to generate new images, new bodies, new narratives, new ecosystems.

Julie Crenn

Excerpt from Cut & Paste by Julie Crenn.
1 MARTINEZ, Aurélie. Images du corps monstrueux. Paris: L'Harmattan, 2011, p.9.