Dream Machine

EMMA PEGRUM You started Convergences in 2016, is that right?

ELISA VALENZUELA Yes. I had started experimenting with moving images, and it was really the beginning of Instagram taking off as a marketing platform. At the time, all the images were static in the business and design market. I started to experiment with stop motion, all by hand – cut and pasting images, and then, frame by frame, moving things around. I did my first animations like that, and I was so excited. It felt like something we’d never seen in the digital space. I thought, “It’ll be wonderful. The future will be in motion!” 

When I started to meet with clients, they were not ready to host moving images because the marketplace was the eShop. I was like, “Okay, but I’m able to do it for Instagram.” And the client would say, “Oh no, we are not sure about spending money on Instagram, Madame.” I had to wait, really only one year, and then the surge of motion and animation for social media really came and I started the studio, Convergences. 

I chose not to give my name to the studio because I do not work alone. I share the work with talented people. For my productions in stop motion, for example, I work with a set designer, a photographer, a researcher, an animator, a musician; it’s a team. Convergences is the meeting point of all these different talents and practices.

EP That makes perfect sense. Before that, you had been working as an illustrator for quite a long time. You worked with the tactile medium of print news magazine. Was the studio a reaction to this shift away from print and toward digital?

EV Yeah, totally. I started my career in illustration, and when I started as a collagist for the press, I began a long collaboration with daily newspapers and magazines. When they all moved onto Instagram, the work became really fixed. In terms of economics, I started to feel a bit locked in a practice, because it was not very well paid. But, more importantly, my style has always been surrealistic – le collage surréaliste [an art movement treating collage as a door between the real and imaginary world, typified by the use of deconstruction, assemblage and paradoxical juxtapositions]. That movement has kind of evidenced the magic of objects, and I saw that I could add motion and it would become the perfect medium to tell my stories. It works like a dream machine. I feel I can do everything and anything I want when I mix animation with collage.

EP That term ‘dream machine’ can be applied to all your work. The movement is so engaging, and there’s so much character in the objects. We really get transported into these little worlds. How do you think about design when bringing these worlds to life? Do you think of yourself as an art director?

EV I always have the same concept process, which centres on a story. That means I have to stay kind of minimalist. I have to eliminate anything that could disrupt the clarity and the structure of that story. I want people to see that I am building a dream machine, so I have to be clear with that. I have to invent some characters and some situations and designs where the idea is self-evident. It’s offering, to the viewer, a way to process the image, allowing people to retain the purity of the idea. I don’t know if I am an art director. I consider myself more as an author. When a client comes to see me, they want my design, my authorship. The photographer and the other creatives I bring together have to be neutral, they have to go toward my way. Also, when you see the link between my personal and commercial work and between all the projects within each, it’s almost like looking at the work of a writer – the style and the form can be recognised.

EP Yes, we can see these continuous narrative threads that run throughout. And because of the handmade nature of the work, there’s such a strong personal mark.

EV I have to justify my artistic gesture. Often you are doing something, and you don’t know when to get over it, or you don’t know when it’s finished. You start drawing and you don’t know when to stop. With digital images, there are so many possibilities. So if I don’t build an object, I don’t know what is available. I need to communicate with the physical object. When I create something in paper, I accept it as it is. If I started working with Photoshop or something, I could never stop doing and redoing. Having it in physical form helps me create without second-guessing myself. Also, I have to say, it’s a really big satisfaction and pleasure for me to use my hands. It takes me back to my childhood.

EP There is a childlike spirit in your work, in its playfulness. But it is also polished. 

EV Yes, I turn it that way: I give the handmade a sophisticated treatment. When someone sees a little movie of mine or a collage, they might think: “I could have done that!” But, you have to have the idea first. Also, there is a huge DIY movement on Instagram and YouTube, and I’m fascinated by it. I love that people love to create things – everybody, not just artists. This is popular art, and it’s so full of inspiration. It’s outsider art. I love to bring outsider art into sophistication. It deserves it. Plus, I’m working with brands like Hermès, Chanel, J.M. Weston, Moynat, which are all selling hand-manufactured products. They’re using their hands to bring the products they sell to life. So there is a link between my practice and my clients’. Voila.

EP You’re right, it’s a form of honouring those practices. How do you balance aesthetics in an image or a video? When do you know if the work is successful? 

EV I already responded to a little part of that question: success is in the clarity. The clarity of the idea and the opportunity for the spectator to interpret it. And then also there’s the element of surprise. For me, you have to be surprised by my images. In collage, the job is to combine elements that are not initially understood to belong together. My job is to create an image where you might say, “I hadn’t thought these things could live together, but now I know they can.”

EP I notice this sense of trickery across your work too – this play with dimension and depth and composition. In the description of one of your personal works, you refer to the technique trompe-l'œil [‘deceive the eye’]. This is a term for the highly realistic depiction of three-dimensional space or objects on a two-dimensional surface, a means of tricking the viewer into perceiving something flat as being real. That’s exactly what’s going on here. In your personal work, for example, what might appear to be a composition of objects is actually a paper collage. But on the other hand, there is evidence of how things are made that appear to be intentionally left in view. So there are these two sides again. Is that intentional, that contrast between trickery and truth?

EV Yeah. I love to play with perception. Therefore, I love to play with contrasts. It seems super simple, but it’s not really. It’s a tension, and it’s really about value. In my personal work, all the elements I propose are in paper, they are mostly flat, and so they’re not valuable in a typical sense. They are not real artifacts. They are artifacts I invent with fragments of paper. But the way I photograph the paper makes them appear valuable. Maybe you think it’s a photoshoot for a museum or a luxury fashion house. 

EP It’s questioning our preconceived ideas about what is valuable, what isn’t valuable and where things belong.

EV Totally. And that links back to what I was saying before about popular art. I mean, in France, we are really snobbish. We have our contemporary art market, our fashion market, our design market – all very high brow. I love to mix everything up just to say, “Look, we can be fun and disruptive and play with symbols and elements and understandings of cultural value.”

EP I think it’s clear in your work that beneath this playfulness is a real reverence for objects. Where does that come from?

EV I’m kind of animistic, meaning, I put soul in objects, I see soul in them. I originally studied object design at university, but I had always been fascinated by objects. I went in another direction with design, because I realised I didn’t want to build objects, I wanted to communicate about objects. And maybe it’s a bit esoteric, but I’m South American originally, and we are deeply connected to tradition and to charms and good luck symbols. In many Latin American cultures, objects are really important. They bring you good and bad luck. I’m definitely superstitious. In the end, it is the objects that stay, not the humans. Objects can cross several generations of a family. They make a real story; they are what we bring to civilisation, what we add to it. They are a testimony of how we live, what our preoccupations are, what our culture is. It’s completely fascinating.

EP And terrifying when you think about some of the things we make and buy. Your work isn’t prescriptive though, there is a real sensitivity to nature and beauty and design and architectural elements. How conscious is that?

EV I really love objects, but I love objects even more when they have been designed by someone, when it’s from someone’s imagination. Something can be beautiful – be an artistic gesture – but have a function, like the chair, for example. I have a lot of belongings designed by my friends, and I have a lot of designer friends. I have become really fascinated by collections, so I now work a lot with catalogues from auction companies or design companies. I love the concept of cataloguing – indexing, categorising. I have a lot of catalogues!

EP Yeah, there’s something appealing about the organisation of objects, of ideas. Research must form a big part of your practice?

EV Yes, I’m always working with the archive. I’m working with existing furniture, existing objects, existing catalogues. Right now, I’m working with these vintage catalogues, because I’m starting to generate some fake objects with AI for a new series of images exploring the fiction of symbols. The images are just AI, nothing is done by hand. I am thinking of using the AI to generate the picture of a sculpture, for example, or an object, and then maybe I will reproduce the object in real life. That would be a first for me. 

But what I love is that I get to work directly with the client. I don’t work for advertising agencies. So first, I talk to the client, and when we have a beautiful story, I visit the manufacturers, I meet the people who are making the product by hand. These brands have so much heritage, history,  [‘know-how’]; that resonates with my work. I get to enter their story, their archives. It’s a fairytale, meeting people making products in the same way they have for one hundred, two hundred years. It’s magical.

EP You come back to the story a lot. How do you move from the story to the image?

EV When I have to do a movie, I always bring an object from the client. I have an object on my mind when I visit the manufacturer or the shop, and I want to work with this object. And then I just have a vision in my head, and the pieces start coming together. I always think the first idea is the best idea. I start to draw, always by hand, and then I mount a storyboard. I draw, I draw, I draw. For me, drawing is a way to think. You start to draw, and it gives you ideas. It helps me stay focused. This gives the eventual style of my designs, which are really simple because my way of drawing is really simple. But the inspiration I find in the archive imbues them with so much meaning.