Dismantling

Kyoto, August 2026

I have been collecting things in Kyoto.

Receipts. Tobacco packages. Gift wrapping. Shoe boxes. Shopping bags. Labels. Paper bottles. Packages whose contents have already disappeared.

Then I dismantle them.

I like this word: dismantle.

I don’t destroy them. I don’t tear them apart. I don’t reduce them to debris. I carefully undo the object. A small cut here, a fold there. I open its construction and flatten it. I keep the pieces.

There is something very specific about dismantling.

When you destroy something, its previous form disappears into waste. When you dismantle it, the form disappears but the parts survive. And because they survive, they remain available for another system.

Maybe this is already part of the logic of hypercollage.

I am a collagist, although collage for me is not necessarily two-dimensional. I collage objects. Images. Materials. Words. Meanings. Cultural fragments. Sometimes even concepts.

This is why I call them hypercollages.

The things I collect already contain information. A Japanese tobacco package is not simply cardboard. A receipt is not simply paper. A shopping bag is not simply a surface. They arrive carrying language, typography, commerce, geography, habits, technologies, desires — traces of the systems they belonged to.

Dismantling suspends those systems without completely erasing them.

The object stops being what it was, but its parts remember.

And then they are ready to become something else.