Accidental Collage is a celebration of noticing the hidden worlds of printed ephemera, torn posters and bygone advertising

Advertising is fascinating. We’re all weary of the Mad Men of the world, we’ve become privy to marketing tricks and now we know full well why products are sold to us, we’re fast figuring out the how. If you live in a large city, every wall is a piece of advertising real estate – it’s bought and sold rapidly to coat our environments with commercials. However, what happens when those advertisements, be it for the new iPhone, gourmet dog food, yoga classes, upcoming gigs or the new Tom Cruise movie, are torn off the walls and replaced? Accidental Collage, by Manchester-based creative design studio Dr.Me and published by Waiting Room Press, is a 400-page publication charting the evolution of physical advertising, capturing the layered and torn textures of decades of advertising buildup. It’s remarkably simple, but as you flick through the book, you experience a Stan Brakhage-esque collage of how our world degrades and renews, holding underneath it a culture of print.

“When we came out of the lockdowns it had really started to grow into an interesting community sharing these found décollage pieces from all over, hoardings from Manhattan building sites, Parisian metro and London underground theatre posters and billboards the world over were captured when they had changed from their original message to something new and ultimately more beautiful,” says Mark ‘Eddy’ Edwards from Dr.Me. “The really beautiful almost painterly décollages are so abstracted that it’s difficult to pick apart what’s happening, where one starts and another finishes. Others are humorous; for a while I was watching a Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds poster peeling off a billboard to reveal the McDonald’s logo…McCave and The Bad Seeds, anyone?”

Accidental Collage has become a bit of a meditation for Mark, who constantly scans his environments for the bricolages of ripped posters – it’s like the world is holding onto the things we lather onto it, unwilling to let go, a manifestation of the way that perhaps our culture moves too fast! Accidental Collage prompts viewers to ask: ‘What is worth covering up? Should a beautiful poster ever be replaced? How do we bargain with covering up the interesting with something duller?’ Artists in the book such as Hisham Akira Bharoocha, Sarah Boris, Nick Deakin, Braulio Amado and Jeremy Gustin help to bring forth those questions through interviews, essays and thoughts on the culture of torn posters.

“Hisham Akira Bharoocha and Sarah Boris have been contributing most of the way through the project and it’s been fun becoming Accidental Collage pen pals with them. Jeremy Gustin and Nick Deakin have come along a little later but both have a wonderful eye. They’ve all written beautifully about different aspects of the project, which gives a really fascinating insight into what makes these things so interesting I think,” says Mark. Most interestingly is that Hisham and Jeremy are both experimental drummers who relate these torn posters, possibly of their own gigs, to their drumming practices. Hisham writes about one of his friends laughing at him for seeing the beauty in these destroyed posters, but Mark finds that fascinating. “I guess what makes Accidental Collage an interesting project is, to some people, all they see is destruction and an ugly torn poster that should be replaced and others see something that needs to be captured for posterity before it disappears,” says Mark.

Even more reason for you to seek out this book is that each cover is individually torn, inspired by the book artist Lydia Davies, who purposefully defiled the edges of her poetry books. Mark instantly knew this is what the project needed – a bespoke degradation, an elevation that makes the publication itself look and feel like its contents, moving the viewer to wonder about the destruction of books and therefore the destruction of print in general. The world is one big collage, oftentimes an accidental one – our environments hold the layers of our art, our advertising, our ambitions, even our own accidents – think of a missing poster for a lost sentimental item. Now think of that poster being ripped down and replaced with a poster for an upcoming movie. How do we approach the ways in which we use our surfaces, the politics of what belongs – and what is torn down?