Opera RotaS was born in 1984 and lives in northern Italy. She landed from an uchronian outerspace bringing with her a wild sense of reality and the talent of turning our media devices into art. She is known with a lot of different names, Maya Rota Klein, minimalbaroque, lait noir, psixel, Stephel Tesla but she will be remembered as the first artist on Mars. Enjoy the interview and follow her on Vimeo, website, Cargocollective, Behance, Youtube, Flickr…
You like to play with your identity, can you introduce yourself and all your alter egos?
I’ve a lot of alter egos. I don’t even remember all the alter egos that I have. It is a game. Or maybe something very serious. Or both of them. I believe in contradictions. Nothing is stable. There are no certainties in this world. Beside all of this I have the feeling that there is a point that is deep in the core of my heart and that is the center of everything. I don’t know the rest and it will not be true if I can know it. Moreover: all this argument doesn’t make sense at all.
My last alter ego is Opera Rotas. Rota is my last name. S is the initial of my name. Rotas is part the latin palindrome magic square the words along with Opera (check it out here).
Where do your love for moving images comes from?
I don’t know. I tried to give myself many answers but I can never find a convincing one. And when I can’t find a rational answer I feel it is the true one. It is like when you fall in love: I can give myself all the rational responses of the world but true reality is that I don’t know.
Can you describe the projects you did that you love most?
I have loved and hated all of my works in different ways.
Each of them reflects myself in different periods of my many lives. From outside people find consistency in my work but the only real connection between one and the others is my feeling. I have gone through sculpture, poetry, theater, photography, hacker art, collage, installation, painting, ecological art, media art, stop-motion, footage found based art. I don’t know how many forms will have my art in the future. It is something I can not explain well. It all depends from my inspiration and from what I have in my hands and what kind of materials are within reach in that moment.
How did you develop them?
There are three ingredients: salt, mercury and sulfur.
Knowing the right amount to use, the right order and the right equipment it’s not enough tough.
These three ingredients must be not just salt, mercury and sulfur, they must be: Philosophical salt, Philosophical mercury, Philosophical sulfur. Once you have those components you are able to get the VITRIOL. I mix these three basic ingredients whenever that comes inspiration and I hope not only to perform all the steps right but, most important, to be myself, this is the fundamental element that ties everything up. All my works proceed in this way. I arrive in some far away place and in another way I come closer to myself. My desire is that I may one day succeed.
As artist, do you look at Italy, the world or what else?
I look to the infinite space above and within me while everything all around spins, for the better or for the worse. These are the places that I’m looking for.
How do you imagine a trip to the stars and the first alien contact?
I speculate about all the mind’s mysteries. Technology and scientific research are proving to be at the end themselves. I do not know if it is right or wrong but as an individual I do not care to follow the fundamentals that support them. I’m more intrigued by the powers of the mind. The supernatural inherent inside man. Futurism preaching trans humanism bored me. I think there are already men who travel in space and that the aliens are already here. I love classic science fiction, complicated and noisy spaceships and the little green men. I would imagine things differently, as if it was the space imagined by man. We give a face to God here on earth, we see the stars with our eyes, we calculate the orbits and draft rules. But then, what is the value in the space sensory activity of man? Or of his thoughts? Or what if once Earth passes an orbit everything behind is canceled? For these reasons I think that when you can perceive everything on a non material level it will really be possible to travel in space. It is for this reason that some people already space travel.
Do you believe in magic?
Absolutely.
[all images by Stefania Rota: selfportrait, VideoSophia #02, VideoSophia #01, Adobe Photoshop Cook, Cinezoïque]
