Onirika Q&A

Guja Quaranta, known as Onirika, is an artist who could never have been anything else. Born in New York to Italian parents both deeply rooted in the creative world, her father a production designer, her mother a costume designer, she grew up on movie sets, surrounded by costumes, colors and perspectives. She built a visual imagination that carries the marks of all of this: the light of cinema, the composition of scenic space, an almost tailored sense of detail. Her artistic practice was born in an unexpected way, as it often happens with the most genuine things. During the first lockdown, in New York, faced with a city emptied and silent like it had never been before, Guja felt the need to give shape to what she was experiencing. The tool she chose was collage: unsold magazines, images torn from their original context, vivid colors recomposed into new balances. What emerged was another world entirely suspended, dreamlike. The name she chose for herself is no coincidence. Her work is precisely what the word "dreamy" can hold: not an escape from reality, but a transfiguration of it. An invitation to look at things as they could be, if only we shifted them a few inches from where we are used to seeing them.

-Where are you from?

- Ah, we start with the hardest question for me! I was born in new york from italian parents and grew up between Rome, Milan, New York and Los Angeles.

-What kind of background did you grow up with?

- Both my parents are in the creative world. I grew up in the opera and on movie sets. my father was a production designer and my mother a costume designer.

-How did you end up choosing your current practice?

- I was breathing art since i was born, i don’t think i could have ended up anywere else!