At the basis of video artist Marcel Odenbach’s paper collages lies the montage principle used in film: combining micro and macro views. Clippings from newspapers, magazines, and historical documents are glued together, repeatedly copied, transferred, and colored until they merge in a big picture, like pieces of a puzzle. While the surface presents a clearly discernible motif, the detailed view shows countless images that make up the whole. At first sight, “Sils Maria” depicts Friedrich Nietzsche’s summer residence in the Swiss town of the same name. On closer inspection, the evocative image of the historically preserved 19th-century interior, in which the German philosopher wrote his major works, breaks up into successive fragments that further explain and qualify the narrative. These elements are deeply saturated with pictorial and textual information. The ceiling is made from Nietzsche’s letters to his sister and friends while the wood panel walls are composed of images of horses, a reference to Nietzsche’s legendary witnessing of a horse being brutally beaten by its owner and the philosopher’s subsequent mental illness. The rug in the foreground is made of historical images of India alluding to Nietzsche’s interest in Eastern philosophy as apparent in the work “Zarathustra.” Instead of representing things as they appear on plain sight, Odenbach’s collage displays reality in overlapping layers and reveals the historical dimension of the present at close range.