Texts
Luke Newbould in-conversation with Irene Zottola
Sirocco Journal Nº3
2025
Irene Zottola is a self-taught artist from Madrid. Using collage and analogue processes, her work explores themes of intimacy, identity, and the human condition.
Through a layered approach, the feeling of your work transcends time. What is your process when creating a new series of work?
In each work the process is different, although there are things that everyone shares: curiosity and desire to experience to tell a story or simply an emotion, through images created with different techniques on different materials. In some way, everything is born from a simple practice, like a child playing.
The series you display are often accompanied by poetry. How do these written reflections illustrate or dictate the direction of your compositions and series?
When we read a word, an image comes to our head. If I write “tree,” every person who reads that word will see the image of a kind of tree in their mind. That symbolism generates meanings. Each word is an image and an image can generate words, ideas, emotions or stories that it suggests to us.
This practice was carried out in a very free way. Sometimes the image comes first and then the word or following a poem, there are interpretations of the images that appear in it. It’s pretty organic. Everything comes naturally during the process. It also depends on which books or authors I am reading at the time or how I feel. If I get stuck, I can always play with chance, music or go to the bookstore and write poetry. The key, I think, is to free ourselves from the pressure we can put on ourselves as creators.
I’ve read that you teach photography at the in Madrid, using photography as a tool for social intervention with vulnerable groups. Is this correct, and if so what is your connection to this?
Not exactly, I am a collaborating teacher with different schools and universities in Madrid such as Lens, TAI, IE Creativity Center and El Observatorio in Barcelona. In these places what I share are creative processes: how the different works of recent years have been born, what doubts arose along the way and how I was solving the various technical and conceptual challenges until achieving a good formalisation of the series. I am not a technical or theoretical teacher. I share more processes and like to reflect with the students on the different narrative possibilities. All this would cover my more “formal” educational practice.
On the other hand, I carry out photography workshops with associations or entities that work with social groups in a situation of vulnerability: adults with mental or physical disabilities, minors or adolescents. In this case, they are usually more practical activities and proposals in which, apparently we are only taking pictures, but in the end you work on many more aspects that are important: identity, creativity, self-esteem, listening ability and teamwork. I believe in photography not only as a tool for individual expression, but also for personal and social transformation.
Being a self-taught artist, your photography feels very personal. Collaging poetry with photography, and reflecting on personal and familial history, how do you balance creative freedom with the technicality of analogue processes?
I think that in this case the key is to forget about the technique and focus on the emotion or message you want to convey. Try different things, play games, see what works and what doesn’t work, until suddenly there’s a moment when you say, “it’s here,” it works. I think error is precisely to be afraid of making mistakes. You have to try and get caught up, get lost on the way to find yourself. Sometimes it will be better and sometimes worse, but nothing happens. The important thing is to try because if we let the fear of “going wrong” block us, in the end we do nothing.
You have to make many drawings, paintings or photographs to find a style, a voice of your own. And even when you think you have it, it will change. Creative processes are as organic as life itself. Balance comes when you feel that you have finished some series and you move on to the next, when somehow a chapter is closed.
In the series Icarus, you explore the universal ambition to fly, to be free. On a personal level, what does this transcendence represent for you?
Flying means transcending, rising, being free. We should ask ourselves what freedom is. Relating it to creation and life, in the end it is about overcoming limits and barriers that can go from being afraid to making portraits of strangers on the street, want to apply for a scholarship and contest to do an artistic residency in a different country or dream of making a sculpture or a film.
There is a direct creative and vital relationship that responds to how you want to live, what you want your life to be, what your dreams are. Obviously, it will not be an easy path to achieve them and even when they do, other difficulties will come. It is life itself. I think the important thing is not to give up and go crawling towards those things that make us happy, being aware of the most “logistics and boring part of life”: paying a rent, a house, bills, basic things necessary to live today. The key is to try to make a balance and get nourish us artistically and vitally doing what we want. This will pose other challenges, I do not mean that by deciding to be an artist and start doing small things everything will be easy and beautiful all the time, but what is clear, at least in my case, is that there are still more uncertainties, I prefer to have the life I have to a steady job from 7:00 to 3:00.
Flight is the journey that life offers us, where we want to go and the adventures we will live along the way.
All Rights Reserved – Text © Luke Newbould & Irene Zottola
Images © Irene Zottola