Collage as a Creative Act: Emergence, Displacement, and Re-signification

This chapter aims to present the notion of collage from its emergence in the avant-garde, starting with Cubism, Dadaism, and Futurism, when it played a strategic and subversive role, to surrealism when theorization about collage takes place and marks a conceptual turn: beyond technical aspects, the collage process was raised to the category of poetic device. This conceptual turn enables a greater use of collage throughout the twentieth century, particularly in the 1970s, when it was put in relation to intertextual practices, as citation, by sharing the principles of borrowing and of appropriation. Collage is here understood as a creative act, the gesture of cutting and pasting heterogeneous materials, verbal or iconographic fragments, displaced from their context and, therefore, resignified. Its repercussion is found not only in painting but also in the creation of unprecedented artistic and hybrid forms, made by media combination, such as the object-poem and the collage-novel. The relevance of recontextualizing collage in a diachronic perspective, with its initial potential, in short, may contribute to resignify it as an intermedial phenomenon, as a form of cultural production marked by the crossing of borders between media, that highlights the materiality and interaction of the objects involved, with relevant implications for the study of contemporary arts and media.