The Urban Gleaner: Harvesting the Skin of the City
On the road from Berlin to London, a 49-day expedition into the “Recollage” of Empire.
Standing before a wall in Naples, you aren’t just looking at a surface; you are looking at a calendar. Months, perhaps years, of public announcements, political screams, and concert advertisements are fused together in a thick, paper crust.
To the passerby, it is grit. To the worker with a scraper, it is a chore. But to the artist, it is a harvest.
I am currently in the final week of a seven-week journey—a nomadic studio practice that has taken me from the industrial sprawl of Berlin to the ancient harbor of Ostia, through the sun-baked resistance of Naples and Ischia, and now, finally, to a rainy room in Walthamstow, North London.
My goal has been to make an average of three collages a day with materials gathered from wherever I am and then setting up studio in whatever accommodation I find myself in. This along with daily journaling and walking al least 10,000 steps a day. I am happy to report I have stayed on task.
My method is a practice I shall call Urban Gleaning.
The Philosophy of the Gleaner
Historically, “gleaning” was an agricultural right. After the main harvest, the poor were permitted to enter the fields and gather the leavings—the stray stalks of wheat or the grapes missed by the pickers.
In the 21st-century city, the Urban Gleaner does the same with information. We scavenge the “spoils” of the modern empire of dreams. We aren’t looking for the pristine; we are looking for the distressed, the overwritten, and the “dismantled.” The bits and pieces and scraps and echos of the city’s public aspirations and memory.
The Harvest: Water and Time
The process is one of slow extraction. Most city posters are applied with water-soluble paste. When I “harvest” a section of a wall, I am taking a block of time.
The real work happens back at the “table-to-table” studio—the rented rooms and hotel desks that have served as my laboratory for the 49 days I am out exploring. Here, the harvest is subjected to Maceration. By soaking these thick blocks of paper in water, the glue finally surrenders.
This is where the magic of the “Unintended Layer” happens. As I peel back the layers, and lay them out to dry I encounter chance meetings of text and color that have been hidden for the months before my arrival. It is a dialogue with an unknown installer, a collaboration with the weather, and a confrontation with the “resistance” of the city itself via graffiti (as I found in Naples, where the non-soluble glue forced a pivot from text to pure, ancient-feeling texture as in the collages above).
From Décollage to Recollage
While art history gives us the term décollage (the act of tearing away), my practice seeks a third stage: Recollage.
Once the layers are dried and the fragments are separated, the reconstruction begins. In the quiet of a London morning or the blue hour after a Roman sunset, I reassemble these shards. I am taking the “Ruins of Empire”—the Latin roots of London, the Greek foundations of Naples, and the modern industrial weight of Berlin—and building a new, unified grammar.
The View from the Studio
As I prepare to return to my home studio in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I am carrying nearly 150 of these “recollages.” Each one is a site report. Each one is a record of a specific table, a specific light, and a specific harvest.
In the high desert air of the Southwest, these dense, damp European “skins” will finally settle. They are no longer posters; they are the distilled memory of a journey through the stratified layers of our collective history.
I have a lot more to say related to this trip but I am only typing on my phone to send you these reports. I will try to write more from the studio later.
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