Felt Zine returns with Issue #68 featuring Spain-based digital artist Teresa Rofer! Teresa’s latest work explores connections between the human body and the condition of our current environment. Experience the interactive issue here, or read the interview below:
How would you describe this project? We’re intrigued by titles such as “A sight onto our impending crisis.”
Nature is always the background referent; it is somehow the link that provides truth and calm to an unstable moment of relentless growth.
A sight onto our impending crisis” is a dreamlike projection of the future that awaits based on our present behavior; dissected human figures before explosion. Human race dies and that’s precisely what is left; the environment, which will remain, and we will be a pure memory.
We are active agents of destruction, playing our role only as participants, just like any other living thing.
This series is about capturing our fragility; we will become a bad time that happened to something much bigger than all of us.
The artworks explore an almost inevitable outcome within our society. What were your inspirations within this series?
In an aesthetic sense, none. Lately I have been feeling very inspired by nature, by the natural environment. I spend a lot of time in the bush, in the forest, walking and wandering around. It is like a climax, the ability to blend something that is purely digital with something as real as the grass.
Making digital art proposes its own series of technical, conceptual, and even ideological difficulties. What difficulties have you learned to overcome through your work? How did you do so?
I find this question very interesting; it is actually something I often talk about. I am 100% self-taught, and this forces me every day to find a way to express what I want. I understand this is something common in other contexts, but our software is pure math after all!
For me it is a confrontation multiplied by two; on the one hand there is this issue of what stories I want to tell and, on the other, how I am going to learn how to do an exact thing in particular. The result of the multiplication? Watching a hundred courses, a thousand tutorials and, in the end, the initial focus of what was to be learned is lost. It gets really confusing sometimes.
The process is awesome, however, because it poses a limitation, but once something new is learned, my ideas are born over again.
What I feel is real fascination by that dichotomy between the technique limitation and the open door to infinite projects.
Where do you live? Does it inspire your work?
During the past few years, I have moved into several cities. I have been living in Seville for quite some time, which is located in the south of Spain.
The fact that I don’t have a permanent home has an impact on my personality and, by extension, in my creations.
At the end of the day, you are constantly moving from one place to another with your own circumstances, ideas and work, which are influenced by how life unfolds in such scenarios.
The thing is, the need to adapt yourself to new places and people, together with the ignorance of how much time a phase is going to last, creates a personal and very sensitive cosmovision of experiences and things. All of this shapes a view, I would say, a little solitary and introspective.
How would you describe yourself?
Visual baby 😉
Do you consider the internet to be more of a source of inspiration for your work or simply a means of presenting it? In other words, does the internet inspire your work?
Both options make sense to me, but yes, of course, it is a great source of information, references and inspiration. Sometimes it is like a lighthouse of light and freshness, but other times it is simply something that distracts you from your style and purpose, with so much information and noise.
Life experiences have a greater impact on my art than the internet (especially the bad ones). As if such art was trying to shout things that I never dared to say; mute messages and conclusions for the future.
Do you consider yourself a digital artist?
This is how it all started and, well, here I am. But my wish and hope is to have the freedom to mutate without having to label myself; I see it as a means and as a tool, not as something that defines me entirely.
The short answer would be YES, haha.
How would you describe your artistic process?
I always have several ongoing jobs in parallel; some are more elaborated, and others are more ethereal, so I usually dedicate myself to developing all those who are less mature and, all of a sudden, I have 40 ideas in process and others are born again.
It is a constant flight forward; I have trouble closing ideas because, as soon as some are growing, others are born from them. My procedure is to finish ideas while others are born, I am never calm, not even with the blank page. The constant movement is overwhelming and exciting. If you ask me for a percentage; I would say: 40% research, 40% execution, 20% revision.
Many of your works touch on the body, philosophy, and subversion of the body. Do your artworks serve any particular community?
Not entirely, I would say they serve my “person”. I think there are two ramifications in the artistic expression; the first one emits a message that embraces a message larger than their own identity and the second one expresses what is born in the heart-brain. The latter is mine. Of course, I perceive influences by many ideological and stylistic currents, but my creations serve my own messages, which in turn are pure emotions and human experiences. Anyone who manages to read them is able to feel identified with what I try to convey.
You,ve produced work in multiple mediums: video, still imagery, etc. How, if at all, do your various projects compliment each other?
I have produced several series that do complement each other, and from a discursive point of view, all my works are based on the same conceptual ideology. So yes, let’s say that all my work complements itself; it configures what I want to convey.
Sometimes I see past work of mine, and I see how it nurtures from my new works; it is as if with the course of time they made more sense to me. The new ones can add more words to the old ones. This moves me because I get to know myself through my works and it ties me much more to keeping on creating.
Do you have any desire to expand your practice across different mediums or platforms?
It is the next step, of course! A few years ago I was very attracted to computers and all kinds of software; I wanted to know about them and blend in with them because I felt that once I knew the medium, I was going to be able to create my own universe, with many more possibilities than photography, video, painting….
Currently I want to turn back, to retrace, in order to apply everything that I have learned to more analog and tangible media; I want to hold the beauties of both worlds, to be able to embody my creations into objects that can be touched and broken (if necessary)!
Which artists or ideas currently inspire your work?
Lately, my greatest inspiration comes from essays that help me verbalize my work, close the conceptual circle. For example, I’ve been reading Cioran for a while.
I constantly keep an eye on studios like Universal Everything, Pitch Studios, Six N. Five, or SELAM X.
I admire artists like Jesse Kanda, Tea Strazicic, Iris Van Herpen, Boris Camaca, Sarah Sitkin, Frederik Heyman, Darío Alva, Satlowski…
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Written by Dev Moore