The Poetry of Chance: A Collage a la dérive.
"My work is born by identifying the materials that chance offers me”
Pablo Cabrera Ferralis is an architect, poet, and Chilean artist based in Germany since 2016, merges his disciplines into a poetic approach in his collage work. His work is characterized by the interaction between urban chance and aesthetic decision. Chance, inspired by Debord's theory of the Derive, involves wandering aimlessly, allowing chance encounters with found and free objects and papers to guide his creative process. From boxes of gifted books to items found on the street, chance plays a crucial role in material selection.
Aesthetic decision is what complements this process, requiring discernment in choosing visual elements that will be combined in the collage. From an 80s german skate manual to a book on 20th-century women's fashion, each found object becomes a potential piece for his work.
Cabrera Ferralis explores the relationship between the found and the chosen, the potential of curating the fortuitous, creating a visual narrative that reflects the intersection of chance and conscious choice, guided by the beauty, by the poetry of Chance.
BY CHANCE / LA DÉRIVE
Venus Nollie. From the serie Skaterinnen
(DIN A4, 2019, analog collage, 2019 / Photos work in progress)
This project was born out of chance, as casual as finding the books in two different districts of Berlin, or stumbling upon the cutting scalpel, by chance, on my work table. That tool wasn't mine, but it invited me to collage. Just as la Dérive invites me: the wandering, walking through the city with spontaneous direction and unknown determination, the impulse, the hunch, the intuition, they are the true protagonists of this work.
ZOOM-OUT
Metro-Halfpipe. From the serie Skaterinnen
(DIN A4, 2019, analog collage + acrylic paint, 2019 / Photo work in progress)
With the central elements defined, it zooms out to develop the work in its entirety, focusing on the “Skaterin“ or Skater-Woman as the focal point and from there composing the collage backwards. On the right, a page from an 80s German manual on how to skateboard with overlapping images of women.
THE VALUE OF A BOOK PAGE
Cherryflip Berlin / Demonstration No-Hand 50/50. From the serie Skaterinnen
(DIN A4, 2019, analog collage, 2019 / Photos work in progress)
The images used are cutouts from actual book pages found on the streets of Berlin, in boxes called "zu verschenken" or “to give away”, which are very common in Germany. The value of each page allows no room for error, as the golden rule of this project is to not produce or reproduce the materials used, but to utilize the real, fortuitous, one-in-a-lifetime thing. What fate and chance have combined holds immense value and they must be used.
PoetryXCollage is a printed journal of artwork and writing which operates at the intersection of poetry and collage. We are interested in found poetry, blackout poetry, collage poems, haikus, centos, response collages, response poems, word scrambles, concrete poetry, scatter collage poems, and other poems and artwork that inhabit this world.
Each issue presents six movements of work by artists and curators. Page spreads are meant to be free zones of thinking where the contributor has chosen all elements of the layout: font, image place, composition, etc.
PoetryXCollage, Volume Seven
Pablo Cabrera Ferralis
Leipzig, Germany
Natalie W Schorr
Greenville, North Carolina, USA
Hanna Madej
Wroclaw, Poland
Dianalog
Palm Springs, Florida, USA
Christy Sheffield Sanford
Saint Augustine, Florida, USA
Asemic Writing
Collage Poems from Anthony D Kelly, Laura Tafe, Thomas Mayer, and Janice McDonald, with commentary by Ric Kasini Kadour.
On the Cover
A detail of BY CHANCE/LA DÉRIVE by Pablo Cabrera Ferralis