Mnemosys by Anna Muller

Art book of analog collages from real photos and Dali’s work, paying homage to Cadaqués, his home with Gala for over 50 years.

Anna Muller’s work occupies a fascinating space where photography, collage, and sustainability converge. Her background as a commercial still-life photographer is evident in the precision of her compositions, but it is through collage that Muller finds her fullest expression—a medium she describes as a “miracle” of transformation. For her, collage is not merely an act of assembly but a process of reanimation: giving discarded images a second life, one imbued with permanence and beauty.

Her practice is, in many ways, a response to the ephemeral nature of the photographic image. By juxtaposing materials and reshaping their contexts, Muller invites us to consider what is preserved, what is forgotten, and what lies in between. 

Muller’s Mnemosys is her most recent project to date. Born out of a residency at the Cadaqués Festival in Spain, it is a meditation on place, memory, and the porous boundary between fact and fiction. Cadaqués, long associated with Salvador Dalí and his wife Gala, provided the perfect backdrop for Muller’s exploration of surrealistic storytelling. The stones of its coastline, the shifting hues of its sunsets, and the omnipresent sea that Dalí so often captured—each of these became a kind of visual lexicon in Muller’s work. Her collages are layered with elements from Dalí’s paintings, yet they remain distinctly her own: a dialogue with an artist’s legacy rather than a replication of it.

The project takes its title, Mnemosys, from the Greek goddess of memory, a fitting allusion for a body of work that so deftly blends archival material and personal interpretation. Just as Dalí wove autobiographical truth with flights of surrealist fancy, Muller crafts collages that blur the lines between historical record and artistic invention. The result is a collection of images that feel at once grounded in reality and untethered from it.

Accompanying each collage is a surreal title—playful, evocative, and wholly in keeping with the spirit of Dalí’s own writings. Muller’s sensitivity to the tactile is also evident in the project’s culmination as a physical book, designed in collaboration with the acclaimed Akiko Wakabayashi. The book preserves the original scale of the collages, offering an experience as close to encountering the originals as possible. Every detail, from the choice of paper textures to the size of the book, reflects Muller’s commitment to the materiality of her medium and her broader ethos of sustainability.

Mnemosys is not just a collection of works; it is an act of remembrance and reinterpretation, a quiet homage to place and legacy that resonates deeply. By reimagining the visual remnants of Cadaqués, Anna Muller offers us a chance to see the familiar anew, to find wonder in what might otherwise be overlooked. It is, in every sense, a body of work about transformation: of images, materials, and ideas.