“Like the hummingbird (Kolibri), the only bird able to hover in place and fly backwards, I see paper collage as agile, delicate and nostalgic yet quietly powerful.”

Michela Paolicelli is a multidisciplinary artist originally from Apulia in southern Italy. Working primarily with mixed-media analog collage, she explores themes of migration, ecological boundaries, and relational complexity.

Her practice draws from a nomadic personal history and from years spent collecting paper fragments across different European cities, which are later reassembled into layered, symbolic compositions.

In early 2025, she initiated her self-directed artistic practice under the project Kollibri. Her work engage with ideas of identity, transformation, and reinvention, often staging a dialogue between the built environment and natural elements through vivid color palettes and elements of magical realism.

Her collage emerge from a very specific inner landscape, that of someone navigating Berlin’s transcience and cultural friction, while carrying the weight of ecological collapse through her professional work. Art became a way to metabolise all of this, to regain hope and a sense of agency.

Michela’s works have been exhibited in group shows in Berlin, Lisbon and Bucharest. She was recently featured on Planet 2030 by Corriere della Sera.