Archives: Talents

Ladislas Chachignot is a French artist based in Barcelona. After studying History, Art, and Visual Communication in Marseille, France, he began working directly as a digital artist and independent illustrator. He has spent over 10 years running his own studio, LadislasDesign. He specializes in “Pop Surrealism” and has an ecologist and biocentric vision that he defines as “Ecosurrealism.”

Concerned about the climate emergency, he uses his creative and artistic tools to center his work around a unique and imaginative vision of reconnection between humans and nature. In this way, he advocates for the need to preserve and care for the environment. He also aims to use this vision and his art to collaborate with people, brands, organizations, and projects to raise awareness and sensitize people about environmental protection.

In 2022, after more than 2 years of work, hand-in-hand with the NGO Pangea Seed Foundation, a very special project for Ladislas was published: the book Sea Change.

Alacalle is the design studio of Maria Molsosa Fabrés and Gustavo Germain Ariello, a Catalan designer and an Argentine craftsman who met while hanging from a trapeze and decided to build a family together, their first creative project on solid ground. During the early years of parenting, the Alacalle project was born, with the idea of communicating through creative actions with a clear environmental commitment.

Currently, they work exclusively with the recovery of materials. What initially was an anecdotal feature of their work has now become their starting point, their reason for being, and their way of working. To do this, they transform materials and objects, seeking new uses and utilities to extend their life cycle, and thus, turn them back into resources. With this approach, and through design and recovery, they create pieces of furniture, lighting, decorative objects, crafts, accessories, and even communication campaigns or artistic installations.

“Transforming objects, giving them new life, is a way of also transforming the world we live in and the way we relate to it. Changing our perspective helps us gain a different awareness, give another value to things, and change the way we produce and consume. We are certain that, through small individual actions, together we can achieve great collective change.”

“We are driven by the belief that there are other ways to live, produce, and consume. That change is not only possible but urgent and necessary to survive in this world. Our personal concerns, our social and environmental commitment, our values, and our awareness have led us to embark on this creative project based on sustainable and responsible design.”

Daniel Bornmann is an artist from Hamburg, Germany, who creates new values from “waste.” By reusing PET bottles, he constructs musical instruments called flairdrums, which, when pressurized, create a unique, exotic, and sustainable musical experience.

At the Drap-Art’22 festival, Daniel Bornmann conducted a workshop where he taught participants how to build their own flairdrum.

Since 1987, Jordi Prat Pons has held more than 60 solo exhibitions, participated in over 100 group shows, and exhibited at 30 international fairs. He has been working with the collage technique for 33 years. He mainly uses bottle labels, old posters, and flyers, which he recovers from the streets and uses based on their texture and color to create works that appear to be painted with a certain realism, thus not resembling conventional collages.

Over time, he has added objects such as bottle caps, tobacco packs, and cans to these collages that resemble paintings, moving closer to assemblage. He has recently started a new project of large-scale installations resembling Pixel Art murals made from discarded books, which are displayed during the Drap-Art Festival on Las Ramblas. According to him, he uses “culture to make culture.”

Ilaria Sansotta is a bookseller and visual artist. She is the founder of the second-hand bookstore LaDolceVita in Barcelona. Coming from the world of book restoration in Italy, she has always experimented with the creative possibilities of paper and related materials. She has participated in Art Libris 2021 and 2022 (Barcelona), Rocart 2021, the Art and Culture Festival (Peñíscola), Drap-Art’21 (Barcelona), the Artist Book Festival 2022, and the La Bóbila Cultural Center (Hospitalet).

Ilaria Sansotta’s works are an invitation to reflect on the delicate balance of Nature, which needs us to be preserved. At the same time, the use of the open book symbolizes the creative process, the birth, and development of ideas. The artwork she presents is like a flower inside a glass jar. The flower has been made by cutting a book: the leaves of the flower are formed by folding leather covers, and the petals of the flower are the same open pages of the book. By opening a book, a flower is born, a story, a life. The earth and its mineral nutrients are also present in the bottle, as well as the sun’s rays, which descend like filaments from the cork of the jar.

“Nature is the elemental force of the world, sacred and eternally creative, which generates and actively produces all things from itself.” — Alexander von Humboldt (Pioneer of ecological thought and one of the first to write about climate change).

Servera is a multidisciplinary visual artist, with a degree in technical architecture, based in Barcelona. He has held numerous solo and group exhibitions. He is the editor of three monographic volumes: Faroleres (Stonberg Editorial), Sabates nàufragues and Paisatges de l’ànima (Sa Nostra) and other publications. He has won various awards in photography, engraving, and painting, and is the founder of Biribotis, where he carries out artistic activities and creative workshops for children, young people, and adults in museums, events, and cultural centers. He has been working as a teacher at the TRAÇ school in Barcelona since 2013.

“I interpret the sea and its surroundings in their magnificence in a spontaneous, vital, and sometimes chaotic way. It also serves as a backdrop to give visibility to what is happening in our environment and to generate a reflection on the environmental effects it suffers due to the human footprint.”

With a background in Fine Arts, Fashion Design, Advertising Art, and Interior Design, Jana Álvarez moves beyond artistic labels, as everything is now multidisciplinary for her. For her, the idea and the material “choose” the technique, format, and form of expression.

She has extensive professional experience as a fashion designer for various brands, as a creative in advertising, a freelancer in illustration and painting, set design for film and TV productions, and interior design projects. Her work includes collaborations with brands such as Purificación García, Antonio Miró, Custo BCN, Bassat Ogilvy, Editorial Murdoch, Boca Films, Productora Zeppelin, TV3, Canal+ France, the 1992 Olympic Games, the National Ballet of Cuba, Hilton hotels, alternative theater, Médecins Sans Frontières, C.G.T., and more.

She has a broad track record in national and international exhibitions, both individual and collective, in locations such as Barcelona, Sitges, Santander, Madrid, Menorca, Málaga, Almería, Bilbao, León, Asturias, Valencia, Paris, Nantes, London, Rome, Berlin, Beijing, Tokyo, Uruguay, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Santa Fe, among others. She has participated in Drap-Art since its inception in 1996 and continues to collaborate with the project.

Her artistic and personal motivation in everyday life is to reuse in order to achieve zero waste. She is critical of the unconscious and disconnected consumer society that leads us to natural, social, and economic extinction.

“This capitalism is unsustainable, leaving behind waste, disasters of all kinds, and ruins in its wake. There is hardly any material that is ‘clean’ or, by now, natural that does not have a negative impact on ecosystems. That’s why I reuse objects and materials of any composition and type rejected, to give them ‘a thousand lives,’ not just two, even if I have to recycle them to their total disintegration. From defeat to defeat until final victory. Change is possible.”

Ramiro Sobral lived much of his life in Tucumán, Argentina. In 2007, he moved to Barcelona, where in 2013 he opened his bicycle shop, El Ciclo, in the Gothic Quarter. It was there that the idea of creating a collection of lamps using leftover bicycle parts from his workshop began. Over the years, he has recycled thousands of bicycle parts.

With this project, which he named Bicicletas que van ver la luz (Bicycles that saw the light), he aims to recover, recycle, and reuse old and used bicycle parts to give them a new life. Gradually, he has created a collection of various types of lamps, made from parts such as spokes, brake discs, chains, etc. While no lamp is identical, the origin of their components is easily identifiable. In addition to the lamps, he has also started creating some furniture pieces, like the stools we are showcasing here.

Bruchstein, a self-taught artist, seeks to establish a close relationship with his subjects. The relationship begins with an invitation to the studio, followed by a brief interview to determine who fits best into the project. So far, he has invited dozens of people, with whom he has spent hours, if not days, cultivating closeness and intimacy until he gains their trust with him and the camera. At this point, he asks them to gradually reveal themselves, layer by layer, both physically and mentally, while he covers them with makeup as a mask: hiding on one hand and revealing and uncovering on the other.

During photo sessions, he takes hundreds of pictures in an attempt to capture the precise moment and expression that aligns with his vision. His goal is to bring out the internal emotions to the surface: body, face, gestures, and expression. Bruchstein uses lights and shadows to emphasize mood and emotions as he blurs the boundaries. Colors and layers of makeup are used as accessories to express the inner strength of his models and blur the line between the inner and outer.

Bruchstein’s characters interact with Art History, as well as contemporary androgynous figures. They have eroticism, but it is asexed. The photos are minimalist, yet full of color, contrast, and seduction. The subjects are often photographed with their eyes closed, trapped in their own imaginary world.

Ulrike Koeb lives and works in Vienna, Austria, as a food and still life photographer. After working as an assistant to renowned photographers, she took several master classes in photography in Maine and New Mexico, USA. These classes had a significant impact on her and gave her the push to dedicate herself to artistic photography. Among other things, she has done extensive research with black and white techniques, such as platinum-palladium prints, which she sometimes colors. Her sensitivity and passion for color and form are an integral part of her work. In addition to commercial book and magazine projects, her photographs have appeared in many other publications.

Her work has been shown in collective and solo exhibitions in, among others, Oman, England, South Korea, the Netherlands, Hungary, Finland, and more recently as part of the Image Festival in Amman, Jordan.

The project r e d u c e / r e u s e / r e c y c l e, to which the works displayed in Drap-Art belong, consists of seductive, sometimes irritating images made from food, found objects, and packaging materials, primarily plastic. She also uses decaying edible products. With these works, she aims to raise awareness about the “throwaway society” and the resulting massive environmental threat. Nature does not produce waste; it works in a circular cycle, which the regenerative model of the circular economy has adopted in order to reduce waste and emissions. Materials, electronic devices, and clothing that are already produced must be used, repaired, and passed on for as long as possible or shared. Our consumption behavior needs to change progressively, as soon as possible. Everyone needs to do their part for this to happen. We only have one planet, but we are acting as if we have several backups.