Is collage taking over graffiti?

• Collage is a facet of street art in full expansion in metropolises.

• Quick to implement, collages are more easily invested in city centers.

• The penalties incurred by artists are also less dissuasive than for graffiti artists.

When the collage appears in the street.

In Lille, in the North, the thrust of collage on the walls of the city is obvious.

We now see them everywhere, including in the center which was, until then, relatively neglected by street artists.

In Paris, Lyon or even Marseille, the phenomenon is less new and more widespread.

However, the followers of this mode of expression interviewed by

all seem to have started recently.

If the reasons for the rise of this means of expression are above all artistic, even political, there are others much more pragmatic.

Like graffiti, stencil and sometimes tag, collage is one of the many offshoots of street art.

There is nevertheless a notable difference in the implementation since it is not a question of painting directly on the walls, but, as its name indicates it, of sticking a creation carried out upstream.

“The bomb is a very special technique that I haven't mastered.

Graffiti artists have to practice a lot in wastelands before they hit the streets.

Me, the collage, I can do it at any time, ”explains Nebuleuz, a 35-year-old artist from Roubaix.

A practical and fast side that is often put forward.

“I always have posters and glue in my car when I travel in case an opportunity arises,” admits Kelu, a painter from Lille.

Fast and less risky

Not spending an hour creating a fresco has very concrete advantages: access to more frequented places while minimizing the risk of being arrested.

"For city centers, it's better, indeed," continues Kelu.

“There is still a bit of risk, just enough to get the adrenaline pumping,” adds La Dame qui glue, another artist from Lille.

And if the police fall on them anyway, the gluers must not mortgage their houses to pay their fines: “I know graffiti artists who have taken 90,000 euros for graffiti on a train, assures Nebuleuz.

For a collage, either we are let go, or we have to pay for the cleaning on a time-spent basis.

And peeling off a poster is pretty quick.

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“A way of saying that I exist”

All are also keen not to degrade, unlike some who claim themselves as vandals.

Nebuleuz only sticks in abandoned places or on walls that have already been glued.

Are banned, in fact, the classified walls and the "old stones".

Dug, a 31-year-old from Lyon, is delighted with a certain benevolence from the city: “I do this for art, not to vandalize.

In Lyon, as in Paris, there is a neighborhood where the practice of street art is tolerated.

If, for its part, The Lady Who Sticks also excludes any desire to degrade, it does not stick to chance: "My idea is to crisscross the no man's land of places where we go out at night, neighborhoods that are not not pleasant for women,” she claims.

For them, the important thing is ultimately to get their message across, whatever it is.

Dug favors the decorative side and the characters “to make people laugh”.

Kelu freed himself from politics until he took up the cause for Ukraine.

The Lady who Sticks has made feminism her hobbyhorse.

“My collages are portraits of women who exist and who have a story about the public space, aggression, abuse, rape,” she explains.

Frank, Nebuleuz assumes the flattering side of seeing his works exhibited on the walls of a city.

“Yes, it's a way of saying that I exist, but I won't do it without a political message to convey.

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