When I started my first “Rottocollages” ten years ago, I was intrigued by the idea of cramming all the exuberant colors and motifs of old Italian circus advertisement posters into rectangular frames of different styles and sizes. In the beginning, it was mostly old frames which, like the scraps of paper themselves, represented the aesthetics of another era and underlined the conceptual idea of the collages being artefacts. Just as the varnish on the canvas or the colors of an old painting are part of its history and aura, the shrill pigments of the analog circus posters are irretrievable materials of a bygone era. After spending some weeks last fall locating and tearing down the last old advertisements of their kind in Southern Italy, I am now more fascinated than ever by just the material itself, so I have left the new collages in the various forms of the original tear-offs, called  “Strappi”.