The Student Spotlight series aims to highlight the work of current MFA students, asking them to share thoughts on their practice by answering curated and peer-submitted questions. Catalina Bestard Rotger '18 is a first-year student in the Visual Arts Program
What themes or subjects are you currently addressing in your work?
I am addressing subjects of memory, personal history and place. In my most recent project I work with photographs I took at my grandma's abandoned house in Mallorca. These photographs have become the archive I now use to create a new work by overlaying them with my spaces in New York. I intend to open a conversation between past and present, memories and physical spaces. I like to think that while overlaying the images I am creating the possibility of a future.
What materials do you work with?
I currently use photography, video and projections. Light in different forms.
What is challenging your practice right now?
A constant conversation between a more traditional way of understanding photography and all the possibilities that the medium has to represent ideas through a more abstracted approach.
What artist or work of art do you find yourself returning to and why?
I always go back to singer songwriter Juana Molina. I like that she was a popular tv star and quit to become an experimental musician when she was over thirty and she is still going. I like that during the last ten years she has navigated towards a certain abstraction with her lyrics and music. And I feel very related to her lyrics -that constantly reference memory- and her creative process, that includes repetition and overlaying through the use of loop pedals.
Your peers ask: who is your favorite rapper?
I don't have one, but i will mention feminist Barcelona duo Barna Bitches.
