Organic décollage is a phrase used by the photographer Maria Stengard-Green[1] to describe the naturally occurring or non-artistically organized décollage that echoes the work of Mimmo Rotella, Raymond Hains, Jacques Villeglé, Yves Klein and Robert Rauschenberg, and whose antecedents probably influenced their pioneering work.
This genre is strongly associated with Mimmo Rotella; he invented it after returning from America in 1953 convinced that nothing in art was original.
[2] Armed with a penknife, he began ripping off posters and pieces of the zinc mounts from Rome's council advertising sites.
Rotella exhibited his "torn posters" for the first time at Esposizione d'arte attuale in 1955 and the term "décollage" was claimed for this genre in the same year by poet, artist and fellow Italian Emilio Villa.
[3] This French word, meaning "to unstick", first appeared in print in 1938 in Dictionnaire Abrégé du Surréalisme and notably from 1949 on, Hains was creating pieces from posters he had torn from Parisian walls.