In Homesickness is a Blue Room

Herta Müller’s famed collages combine artwork and poetry, language and image, play and poetic gravitas.

“Shortly after I left Romania, I travelled a great deal. I wanted to keep in touch with friends,” writes Herta Müller. “But the postcards had such awful colours. On all of them, the sky was a thick blue, the trees a thick green, the roofs a thick red. One day I bought white index cards and a glue stick, and on the train, I began cutting out a black-and-white photo and words from the newspaper with nail scissors.”
That is how it all began. Words and colours have kept their hold on Herta Müller. She writes with scissors and paper. The words are hers, and the images propel them into unexpected constellations. Suddenly, in the pasted poem, their essence – reality – is revealed. Because “maybe words too have changeable moods and abuse their position...”