Collage and substory telling
The past years have seen the rise of the concept of upcycling. Reusing, transforming, recombining things (clothes, furniture…) to create new ones… for environmental as well as fashionable purposes.
From this perspective we only think about what’s consumable, material things… but if we switch to the perspective of the immaterial, of our thoughts, ideas and experiences, we could end up with the same upcycling process…
Our memories, souvenirs, visions, feelings… shards and instants collected and stored in our brain as days and years go by. It is full of images, words, sounds and our dreams are the recombination of those parcels of existence. A dreaming brain is nothing but a creative upcycler… but also a narrator as it tells another (unconscious) story from what it found in its storage.
Neither truth nor lie, a dream is nocturnal poetry, a theater of experimentation… cut and paste… a collage of our „self“… maybe more objective and real than we would like to admit. All those smithereens of paper, images, isolated words or faces, could be a mess if they weren’t the story of our lives… a psychological dissection.
A dream, as a collage, is at the same time a process of taking control and losing control. You can’t catch a dream but the dream will haunt your sleep, irresistibly…
The technique of collage seems the closest possible approximation of the dreaming brain and its multilayered architecture… a multifaceted gem. Picking words from texts or faces from an ocean of pictures, recombining them into an elaborate new story, a new reality (maybe the only one), challenging our certitude. There is no single meaning but an existential quest of understanding.
A collage would then be an awakened dream… consciousness seizing power of the unconscious. The lonely dreamer suffering through his inner vision makes room for„dream tellers“ and „dream seekers“. The artist and their audience can experience a dream that neither could have dreamt on their own… something universal yet tangible… breaking through the limits of reality to gain eternity.
ABSTRACT MIMESIS 