ALESSA ESTEBAN

« I have been working with very personal themes. Mainly, I like to develop drawing series, paintings and multimedia projects. I’m really interested on how our psyche relates with our emotions into a fantastic, autobiographic and narrative result. My interests go from psychoanalytic theories, poetry, performance, cinema, horror literature, surrealism, spirituality and Interactions with other artists and their work.

I started inventing characters with certain psychic pathologies and contradictory attitudes, contrasting amongst the sweet and the violent of human emotions. Developing my own iconography to give certain atmosphere to the content I use, like with layers, you could see at the first sight, a nice line, delicate feminine image but at a second look you will find other meanings, probably upsetting for certain viewers.

(I have been studying Freud’s impressions of his own occidental ideology. Psychoanalysis is like applying poetry to the psyche, has no sense, but it finds beautiful forms in a three-dimensional group of words that become situations outside the mind. Of course it has another reason to be, but it has a common principle, create words to give form in our extern world. Like in Theatre, (I did a lot of theatre when I was younger), it creates fictional situations taking the material from the emotions and own experiences, things that can embody a character that is not really who I am, but it comes from my psyche again. )

That is how my art work in drawing started, recollecting pieces from my own memories and the ones I couldn’t find cause they were not there anymore. I have two younger sisters I felt responsible for; I had nightmares of the huge responsibility to take care of them when the three of us were almost the same age. I started developing drawings of girls, coming from those personal anecdotes and finding a reinterpretation in a diverse game of situations with a heavy psychological content.

The reason I work with series, it’s because of the story, I tell stories and relate a group of images between them to make a concept that remains in people’s mind. It is a turn back to infancy to capture and recover memory. The real anecdotes and the true personalities of my characters are mixed with fantasy. I intend to create fictional stories with a high Psychological content in order to awake hidden emotions.

From the drawings I started developing performances, and sculptures, based on the same interests but this time, opening the actions to the public. Sometimes in a provocative way, some times with the purpose to interact in a social intervention or simply to occupy the unknown space of certain residency.

I have worked as a visual artist for the past 15 years, many of these years living in another country where I don’t speak the language or know much about the culture. I adapt into a new environment, I learn the lives of others, their customs and produce pieces of art trying to consider always an original, challenging point of view related to my own history.

I have had the opportunity to experience the importance of being in other residencies; I worked in Austria, Mexico, Luxembourg, Taiwan, Berlin and Egypt amongst other cities being highly valuable for me, making me move from the safe and conventional format of my process to be solved in a completely different way. Even situating my attention out of the intimacy of the piece of artwork. It is always about challenges that motivate new ideas that will change the way and directions of producing.

On my last residency in China, I was very much impressed by the Tsinghua University Students, marching, chanting hymns for hours before studying. That view, detonated a huge interest on how we perceive our own spirituality, and how we get distracted with all the political, economical and social structures away from getting to know ourselves to have an awaken awareness. The series Too Bright to Look Closer, its about spirituality and self awakening in a structured world comparing the militant scheme between China and Mexico.

So here I am, still reading poetry, trying to interconnect all my interests in art between actions, drawings and live psychological situations; traveling a lot, searching for something to keep on going creating… »