— You mentioned that you don’t work with people’s stories, instead you work with people directly — could you tell us a bit about how this approach developed in your practice? And in what ways has your background in drawing and illustration influenced your working methods?

— If working only from observation, you risk a kind of far-sightedness—a blurriness in the way you can understand a subject by only looking or reading about it. If there’s a group of people struggling with a specific issue, such as poor working conditions, and there are maybe a hundred articles written about it—the specificity of what people are actually complaining about gets lost in translation. Or even if you use a single case or event as your reference, the subtleties of that event get lost if you haven’t been part of it yourself.

That’s why it’s so important that conversations happen—they create spaces of intimacy, trust, and transparency. We always bring a personal intention into a project, and those intentions come from a positionality that is inevitably biased. Conversations open up and challenge the understanding of that subject. It’s crucial that the conversations and exchanges with people allow you to redefine the methods, materials, and tools you use to collectively represent the topic explored, otherwise their stories are only used to validate the work, rather than shaping the work itself.

If I always use the same methods and tools for every project, what tends to happen is that I end up creating a product for myself, rather than responding to the specificity of each project. Of course, everyone has certain crafts they enjoy more than others—I have processes that I continually return to. I often draw to understand conversations, but almost never use them as final outcomes. I revisit the drawings, recordings, other forms of documentation, and translate them into something that makes sense collectively. That is how I like to use illustration and drawing—as ways of gathering and processing information, connecting ideas or capturing a moment. Words can be limiting, especially when you’re dealing with emotions, gestures, or memories not easily articulated through language. Sometimes a repeated stroke or particular textures can record those feelings more accurately.

There is often a rigid perception of drawing and illustration, as they are usually seen as 2D, something to be hung on a wall, or a way of portraying reality or fantasy. I’ve been more interested in what happens when drawing becomes active and illustration is understood as processes applied to illustrate concepts, whatever the medium and format. I was trained to think in terms of ‘good’ or ‘bad' drawings, which often meant hyper-realistic representations of objects or moments. When I collaborate with others, their input challenges my learnt rigidity and it is then freeing and drawing comes alive in a new way, which transforms how I see drawing. That’s why, for me, drawing is less about producing final outcomes and more about methods of understanding—about processes rather than visual statements.

— Your participatory approach seems to give form to unheard voices through transforming collective tools—and the act of using them—into images. Could you share a bit about how your methodology shifts across different projects ('Traces', 'Landscape', and 'Mano Vuelta')? What changes in your approach depending on the community or context you’re working within?

— It is refreshing to work with different tools, because tools add a new language and respond directly to the subject and the context in which the project is developing. Mano Vuelta was a project developed during my residency in Casa Wabi, Oaxaca, Mexico. Bringing my own tools, or ways of working from London didn’t sit well in that specific environment or with the group I was working with. I found it much more interesting to transform something they considered ordinary from their day-to-day lives into tools of making. In that case, we turned corn into a paint roller. By transforming working tools, and their functionality, these same tools become tools for imagination and allow us to leave marks, becoming a way of materialising the repetitiveness and the concept of labour itself.

In Traces and Landscape, which were part of a longer-term collaboration with cleaners, a similar principle applied. Objects carry their own social and cultural meanings and are visually representative of the person using them. For example, bristles from brooms are something people don’t really want to touch because it’s dirty, and historically, that same idea is followed by the person holding the broom stick too. Angela Chester, one of the cleaners I worked with explained to me: “With one bristle you cannot remove dust, you need a whole broom.” That became the basis of the work: one bristle is nothing, but together they create landscapes. These ideas emerged from conversations, and that’s when participants became part of the process, taking co-ownership of the work produced—which is something very important to me.

My methodology shifts depending on the commission and the time available. Sometimes it is challenging to align how you would like to work with people with the actual space and resources you are given. It’s always a negotiation—not only about the project while it is happening, but also about how to sustain relationships once the funding ends. Most of the time, the institutional project finishes, but the relationships continue. Sustaining relationships beyond the funding is one of the key questions I’m constantly trying to figure out.

— Could you share a bit about how you conceptualise your position/role in collaboration with the community? How does your research and approach support the visual outcomes not only reflect the participants’ perspectives but also communicate to a broader audience?

— The way I position myself is by being transparent about what to do with a specific group. The way I like to do it is by saying: I have this budget, this time, and the possibility to use a space to display or highlight what we can do together —and then asking: are you interested in being part of this process? It is almost like I build a proposal for the local group I’m working on, and it is up to them if they want to be part of it and or use the space on their own terms. What I’ve been doing for a while is making sure their participation should always be covered in some way if they decide to participate: either they are paid to come to the place, or for their time. It’s important to create moments of clarity of what each person is getting out of their time and participation.

All of these need to be presented when I propose a collaboration with a group. The way I position myself is: these are the tools, here’s maybe a previous project I worked on—always with transparency. Money is especially important to be transparent about, because that shows how much time you can dedicate to the project and also what kind of benefits participants can get out of it. Clarity really changes whether people want to be involved. I don’t think there is a recipe on how to work with groups—like, if you do this and this, it will work. Sometimes you do all the ‘right’ things and it still doesn’t work or it doesn’t align ethically with your way of working. I’ve had many different experiences depending on cultural backgrounds, ideas of time or value, or even what art means to participants, and all of that can change the dynamic. Flexibility has to be constantly present because I am the one who proposed the idea in the first place.

Sometimes loads of different activities and exercises I thought would be useful for the final work turned out not useful at all. But it isn’t a waste of time, rather a part of relationship building, which is much more beneficial for the participants and for myself. Part of the socially engaged practice is: you work with humans, not a formula. Working with a group of people is unpredictable, but there’s the beauty of it—the chaos is where poetry emerges. A passing comment, a gesture, a tool exchange, or something one person says might become the thing that should be highlighted.

I like to create spaces for exchanges of knowledge to happen. There are exercises that help stimulate conversation, but I wouldn’t call that a workshop. That’s when you start playing with the conceptualisation of how an idea can be transformed into a method that responds to concepts. There is an abstraction of a conversation when it gets translated into another image—that is when you start building connections. I do a lot of mind-mapping and loose writing to understand what can best convey participants’ messages. I personally have my own preferences, participatory performances, because I like the public part of the work—to invite people to bear witness of the issues being highlighted.

— In Traces and Landscape, you look into the same group of (migrant) labour and its interrelation within the social network, what have been the most significant ethical challenges—and the most valuable insights during your collaboration with them?

— The biggest challenge is how benefits are embedded in the institution. The artist will be the one who benefits—they might get future commissions based on it, so there is a clear gain for them. The question is: what happens with the people who participated in the workshops? How are they benefiting in the long term? There’s a rule I’ve set for myself: every time I write a project report to include things that could be changed within the institution I’ve been working with. I work closely with the union, and they help me write potential solutions to the issues they have raised during the encounters. This is the boring backstage work—it’s not part of the visible outcome but an administrative one and a fundamental part for the projects. Without it, the work doesn’t end.

In most of the subjects I work with, it is hard for workers to say what the actual problem is, and it helps to have a middle person that is not necessarily a union. There was a moment when I said: this work won’t be shown until certain changes take place. I was working with cleaners who complained they didn’t even have a five-minute coffee or tea break during their shifts. I told the institution commissioning me: I won’t show the work until you implement at least ten minutes of paid break. For me, making art is also about respecting the participants who are trusting you in this process. Art-making is about building a legacy of something that happened at a particular moment in time—you materialise it through illustration, or image-making. Alongside that, there are other things I become aware of and care about. If I abstract all the messages and experiences into a painting or drawing is great if it is capturing a collective experience, but it feels something is missing—an extra layer that could take the form of a report, capturing complaints and requests directly and even if they aren’t part of the work shown is the skeleton of the work itself. It’s a pack with various components.

— You mentioned your awareness of the non-neutral essence of the use of the word ‘community’ — could you elaborate on your observations regarding this, and how your practice negotiates the assumptions often embedded in the use of this term?

— I like the word community, but it’s often badly applied. At its root, it comes from the idea of the commons—something shared, which makes it a beautifully constructed word. The problem is less with the word itself, and more with how it has been used, especially in the cultural sector. It’s often applied to marginalised groups as a label: they are a “community” in need of help, support, or intervention. Institutions repeat it endlessly in funding applications and grants, without questioning what it really means.

Language shifts over time—and I think we need to be more precise. I avoid using this word unless the group finds themselves like a community. Sometimes groups are called a community simply because they live in the same place, or do similar jobs, but that doesn’t mean they see themselves connected. Belonging is more complex than an external label.

— You mentioned your preference for long-term research -- how does the passage of time affect the depth and complexity of your understanding of the people and themes you work with?

— Time is everything—if working with a group of people, it needs to be long term to develop a relationship and trust. Some subjects are deeply layered, shaped by histories that extend far beyond the immediate context. Take labour as an example: the types of jobs people are given are often connected to colonial histories, to the dominance of English as an international language, and to the way control is exercised through that. In one project, the workers I collaborate with don’t speak English. I find it revealing: they’re invited to the UK only for physical work, not for their ideas or contributions. There’s no effort to provide language classes, no attempt at cultural exchange. That already sets the framework—you’re here for your body, not your voice.

Understanding those structures takes time, just as working with institutions takes time to uncover their biases and their expectations. What I want to avoid most is the kind of celebratory project that simply showcases ‘diversity’ or ‘community’ as something positive to be consumed. If we are celebrating it’s about the work and time we have put together but not so much of the narratives the work contains. Sometimes the work isn’t about celebrating—it’s about confronting the opposite.