New Term: Recollage

Several collages made in Naples

There is a new series of articles brewing based on my travels. First let me coin a neologism.

While out on my 7 week collage expedition I decided to come up with some new terms that relate specifically to expeditionary collage making.

While recollage isn’t a standard textbook term in art history like collage or décollage, it is an emerging concept used by contemporary artists and researchers to describe a cyclic, reconstructive process.

I have been using the word recollage for some time myself but am formalizing it here.

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Recollage: The Art of Secondary Synthesis

Definition: Recollage (French: re- + coller, to glue again) is an artistic practice that involves the assembly of materials that have already undergone a process of disintegration or dismantling. Unlike traditional collage, which typically uses “pristine” found objects, recollage specifically sources its materials from the aftermath of décollage—the weathered, torn, and layered remains of urban communication.

The Third Stage of the Urban Cycle

To understand recollage, one must view the city wall as a living timeline. The cycle moves through three distinct phases:[7]

1. Collage: The initial “pasting up” of a message (a poster, a sign, a notice).

2. Décollage: The “destructive” phase, where time, weather, or human hands peel away layers, creating a chaotic and accidental “palimpsest” of public speech.

3. Recollage: The “restorative” phase, where the artist harvests these “spoils” and re-authors them into a new, deliberate composition.

Recollage vs. Collage: The Difference of Intent

Standard collage is often viewed as an authored, constructive, and additive process. Recollage, however, is a secondary synthesis. The materials used are not chosen for their original, clear marketing message or imagery, but for their “distressed” qualities—their history of decay. Recollage is a form of urban archeology/anthropology. By “re-collaging,” the artist is not just making a picture; they are archiving the history of the wall itself.

The “Spolia” of Modernity

In a historical context, recollage is the paper-based equivalent of spolia - the ancient practice of stripping marble from ruined Roman temples to build new cathedrals. It treats the “ruins” of the modern city (dismantled text, industrial scraps, and paper skins) as a raw resource. [11, 12]

For the modern traveler - such as an artist moving from the industrial grit of Berlin to the ancient ochre of Rome - recollage becomes a way to map the territorial palette of a journey. It takes the “shards” of a region’s language and reassembles them into a new, unified grammar.

This process of expedition takes into account the artist’s encounter with a new environment and the impression of its weather, it’s light, its palette, atmosphere, shapes and forms, architecture, the texture of the daily life, the food, the customs. The artist is stepping into a happening, an event that is the living city they find themselves in. The project is to aesthetically and poetically respond to this encounter.

Recollage as “Arts-Based Reflection”

Beyond the visual arts, the term has recently been adopted in academic research to describe a method of autoethnography. In this context, to “recollage” is to take the disparate fragments of an experience (travel notes, photos, collected scraps) and piece them together later in a studio setting to uncover deeper meanings that weren’t visible during the “walk”.