How does art come intro someone’s life? That’s a tricky question that has no correct answer. Silvana Doljanin's case was serendipity: everything came by chance after buying some old magazines in a flea market. With an inner need to express herself, she starting tearing them apart and creating meaningful images to her. From then on, she’s become a visual enthusiast and has created a magical world made of boxes with newspaper cuts, stickers, postcards, stamps and old photographs in which she’s let us in to discover more about it.
Would you like to introduce yourself and tell us how and when did your connection with art start?
I was born in 1991 and I’m a graphic design student at the University of Buenos Aires. I come from San Bernardo, a little town on the coast but I have lived in the capital for seven years. My connection with art began when I was around fifteen years old, when I started to make stencils and to paint them in my town. Then I took some painting and woodcut classes that let me discover artists like MC Escher, who blew my mind.
Why did you decide to be a collage artist?
It wasn’t a decision, it just happened. There was a point in my life where I had the extreme necessity of expressing myself in some way and I tried to do it through art. One day I bought some old magazines in a flea market and tearing them apart to find I was able to create new things was such a good feeling that I haven’t let it go until now. By that time, doing that was kind of a relief – and it still is now, only it’s also fun.
Could you explain the process of making your collages? Where do you find your material? And do you look for something specific, or the result is something born from coincidence?
It consists in spreading all the papers, cuttings and magazines I have in the table and then look through all of them. I choose two or three cuttings that I like or that generate some feeling in me, and then I try to unify them with something else. Sometimes I keep a collage half finished for months until I find what I want to finish it. Usually I look for magazines in old or cheap bookstores and I always look at the trash in the street, where I have found amazing things.
Would you say that being a collage artist means being a collector as well?
Yes, totally! I’m a visual enthusiast so I keep every image I like, not only from magazines but also postcards, stamps, street advertisings, signs, stickers or just papers with textures I like. I keep them in boxes or I put them on my walls, where I see them every day and inspire me in different ways depending on the ideas I have in mind at that moment. My graphic design studies have a lot to do with this because I’m always looking at things to modify their sense and appropriate them in my own graphic way.
Out of curiosity, have you ever liked a picture so much that you couldn’t tear it apart and put it on a collage? Or does it work the opposite way: the more you love an image, the more you are willing to put it in one of your artworks?
I find it hard to let an image that I like very much go. I usually keep it for a long time until I use it – I have kept scraps for years. But I would like to do the opposite and not giving too much importance to it.
How would you define your work? What are the main characteristics of your collages?
I can’t find a word or phrase to describe my work, it’s just me and everything I like, what I’m interested in and what makes me curious.
What stands behind your work? What is your inspiration?
The human being condition has always interested me, mostly the evil and irrational but also the fragile side of ourselves as individuals and as a society. I guess the world as a violent and absurd place is my main source of inspiration.
Do you usually have already an idea in mind before starting your collages? Or is it rather an unconscious process?
It is definitely an unconscious process. To me, making collage represents the time when I try not to think or let the cuttings interact with themselves with no specific reason. I think about them once they’re finished; and that’s when I realize that an idea in which I’ve been thinking is reflected in the result.
I can see there is a lot of black and white in your more recent work. Is there any reason behind this?
I have always felt more fluent when working with black and white pictures because it’s easier for me to make a collage when I see everything unified thanks to the lack of colour. On the other side, I’ve been photocopying amazing material from magazines and books that I find in libraries, and doing it in black and white is way cheaper.
For me, collages could be defined as metaphor of the reality. What reality do you want to tell/show?
I want to show the reality that is alive and moving.
Secret wish?
Not letting my mind get old.
