Carla Martín

**Where are you from and how does that affect your work? **
I was born in Alcalá de Guadaíra, a town in Andalusia, southern Spain. I feel that the cultural environment of my childhood was shaped by a particular contrast: on the one hand, the influx of foreign visual media through globalization and the early stages of the internet; on the other, the presence of highly specific trades inherited from previous generations, especially my grandparents, whose lives remained closely connected to a more rural way of life. This resulted in scenes that remain deeply tied to my memory, where I could spend the afternoon catching grasshoppers or making dirt piles in the backyard, and then come inside to watch my cousins play Final Fantasy on the PS2. I think that the coexistence of these seemingly distant worlds continues to shape the way I think about images, objects and cultural references. There’s a tension between older relationships to the material world and the highly specific character of fandoms, videogames and other forms of visual culture that really interests me.

Tell us about your favorite medium.
My practice is inherently interdisciplinary, and I think it emerges from the tension between graphic formats or images and the materiality of sculpture. There is a persistent impulse in my work to bring into the world of objects a certain sensibility that seems to belong only to images or representation. My interest lies less in either discipline on its own than in the uncomfortable space between what we touch and what we see. Lately, I have been working extensively with tools that embody this duality between the digital and the physical, such as scanning, image processing and printing, as they allow me to move fluidly between drawing and sculpture. There is a certain honesty in the immediacy of drawing that can be difficult to translate into other disciplines, especially those whose temporality is denser and more laborious. Perhaps this has become one of the central challenges in my recent work.

**Describe your dream project **
One of my current goals is to undertake a residency in Japan in order to develop a project around the figure of the brand mascot or promotional character. I am interested in these characters as a cultural form that exists somewhere between graphic design and mythology, where the idea of the “cute” operates as a strategy of visual unification. If you read a city through the lens of its mascots, it turns into a symptomatic portrait in the shape of a bestiary. Japan particularly interests me because of the sheer variety and constant renewal of its mascot culture (yuru-chara). Promotional characters continue to be produced, updated and circulated across institutions, companies and local communities. Unlike many European examples, which often remain tied to the graphic design trends of the 1990s and early 2000s, these figures constitute a living and continuously evolving visual ecosystem. I would like to conduct extensive field research, documenting and archiving hundreds of these characters while studying the contexts in which they appear. I imagine the project eventually taking the form of a sculptural bestiary, expanding lines of inquiry I began in my recent solo exhibition at C3A in Córdoba.