Alba Galocha
In conversation with Claudia Laverack
Photos by Silvia Coca (@silviacoca_)
Alba Galocha is an artist, actress and model from Galicia, currently based in Madrid, Spain. Finding herself on the cusp of adulthood burdened with public observation, after falling hard and fast into a career in modelling, and later as an actress in acclaimed Spanish TV and cinema, Alba came to realise she was a little lost in the image of herself that others had created for her. She sought refuge in a cathartic artistic practice, putting acting on hold to study ceramics and reclaim the body that she had begun to disassociate with.
I caught up with Alba on a cloudy studio morning earlier this year ahead of her new show,‘Estaba bien ahí, donde estaba, en mi cuerpo’ (I was fine there, where I was, in my body) which she brings to life with the support of Martin Mayorga, the Madrid-born curator whose career in the London art scene spans over 10 years of work with more than 90 artists.
Poised in an unassuming outlook, Galocha invited me to delve further into the significance of the deeply emotional body of work she’s built over recent years, offering a small window into the existence of the young artist, and the physical form she’s battled with herself to embrace—one that now serves as both subject and vessel for her artistic expression.
Alba: I was born in Santiago de Compostela and we lived in a house with a garden outside the centre of the city. We had freedom to come in and go out whenever we wanted. My aunt Margot had a kindergarten 2 houses away from ours and there was a lot of kids in the neighbourhood, it was nice. In my family I was the only girl. I have two brothers and a lot of male cousins, so I spent most of the time reading while they played football or video games. Reading has always been a way for me to escape reality. Galicia is still the place where I go to rest and get away from the noise and smell of Madrid. I like to walk in the mountains alone or with my partner and just be quiet.
C: Was art always a part of your life growing up? Was it something that was encouraged?
A: Education and culture were really present in my family. I think my mum always wanted my brothers and me to be artists in some way, but I think for my brothers the encouragement was more obvious. They went to paint and ceramic classes, ballet and theatre school, they did everything! Nowadays my mum says she's a feminist, but back then I think she was more focussed on my body and my beauty. She was a woman in the 90s, and she was super beautiful, super skinny, super successful, you know? She took me to get hair removal when I was 12- I was a baby! She didn’t want me to think about myself in relation to my looks, but at the same time, she was putting pressure on me to fit into a certain mould, and that wasn’t me at all, I wanted to play basketball and do what my brothers did.
C: Do you think this is what led you in the direction of modelling?
A: I started working as a model when I was 19, it provided me money to move out of my Mum's. I needed to live on my own and have some independence at that point, but I wasn't the prototype of a model- I was looking all the time for something else. I was working, making money, living a good life, but I wasn't happy with my job. Then I started painting and doing ceramics. It took me a lot of work on my own to get to know what kind of art I wanted to make, or what kind of artist I wanted to be, because I was already so busy working.
C: Did modelling ever get in the way of the path to becoming an artist?
A: I'm sure I wouldn't be in the position that I'm in now if I hadn’t modelled because my work gave me the money and time to stop at a point and learn a technique. Actually, the first acting course that I did, that was the moment when I realised I have the ability to tell stories. The course was about going into your subconscious and trying to create from that. At that point I wasn't used to letting myself go, so it was interesting because I had a lot of experience within my body that I wasn't really aware of. That was the moment I knew I was an artist. I didn't put it that way at the time, but I realised there were a lot of worlds inside of me that I needed to explore. In the end, nothing is in vain.
C: Could you put into words what your work is about?
A: It's been an evolution of exploring what I wanted to know about myself, and the world that I've grown up in. I realised along the way that my body has been my working tool for a long time, and I wasn't giving it the space and the respect that it needed, so that became a focus. Early on I went back to my roots, looking to life before modelling and acting, to understand more of who I was, and then I started paying attention to what my body had to say. When you start taking credit for what’s inside you and being aware of it, it's like you start believing in yourself and your story more and more. I started thinking about that and realising that I was a mentally attuned person, and for me my body came second, but for society my body was all they could see, and what was inside of me wasn't really important.
C: Your work is a very personal exploration, but do you think it can also be related to the female experience generally?
A: The body is important to my work and as a woman I try to talk about how we feel about the body. It's like my mother, she has always been this woman that wants to be skinny, and she didn't really take care of herself. Then I speak with my friends, artists, that you might assume wouldn’t think about this, and some of them tell me ‘I want to do some procedure on my face so it’s thinner’ and it shocks me. I've grown up in an industry that tells you all the time how you should be, and though it might not be the same experience, there’s something in the pressure and judgement of this that all women understand; I try to expose it.
C:Since you've been a part of that world where women are pulled apart and dissected so much, do you think your practice has given you a chance to put yourself on display in a kind of parallel universe where it makes you almost immune from that type of scrutiny?
A: I think that's what I would like it to be, but it's super difficult to be in that elevated place. I've been studying and reading all about how I have to feel good about myself, but I still have those intrusive thoughts. I think it's difficult to get out of that but that's what I'm trying to do, there was a point where my body was totally exposed in the pictures and the films and the magazines. It was my body, but I wasn't taking care of it, it wasn't a real thing for me. Every time I got drunk, I would fall on my face or hurt myself; I broke my nose, I cut open my eyebrow twice and my chin once... It was like I was fighting with myself, with the tool I had, and now I realise I was mistreating myself, because I wasn't happy with what I was working on. Now I'm super aware of my body- when it feels good, when it feels bad, and everything, but it's difficult to be 100% happy every day.
C: In which ways have you translated these emotions and thoughts into your work?
A: My second exhibition was called ‘El cuerpo sabe, la cabeza se resiste’ (The body knows, but the head keeps resisting itself) and what I tried to do was to let my emotion and my impulse talk about all these things that were in my body that I didn't really take the time to deal with previously. I use fabric and stitching because I think it's a good metaphor for the body and the scars that hold emotions in. I'm a very emotional person, but society has made me hide it. I remember, for example, situations with men telling me that I was too old for modelling jobs and I was only 23, it hurts but you have to hold all that stuff in. So, I think fabric and stitching helps me talk about all these constrictions and all the tightness in my body, feeling scared and trying to hold everything inside.
C: And what about in the show you’re working towards at the moment?
A: More recently I started working with moulds and ceramics and I found that the moulds kind of acted as a cocoon or a shell. I talk a lot about my body but in this new exhibition the body is not actually present. In the first room there will be sculptures shaped as my actual head. My face is something that people have used to sell products, but I wasn't really confident with it, and I'd see it in a magazine and feel like that’s not me, so this was a way of reclaiming my face, presenting it as I wanted to be presented. The second piece is my take on a forest. When I'm in the forest next to my dad’s house, I feel like my body disappears, and out there it's so beautiful that I don't think about myself or the space that I inhabit in the world, it's just this feeling of calm. In this show I’ve found myself making a safe space for the body to exist.
C: How's everything going with the preparation for the show?
A: I’m kind of nervous, because I finally have all the moulds and they’re working for the moment except one of them, which is not acting that well, so I need to fix this. When you deal with moulds, you put work into it for over a month and you don't even know if it's going to work out until the very last moment.
C: Maybe that's good, it might bring extra emotion to the final project?
A: I mean, it's been super fun and I feel really proud of myself, but also, I can’t be too proud until it's finished. The first head that I unmoulded that worked, one of the ears had a hole but I don't care. I was alone in my studio and I started crying, I was like, ‘oh my God, this is amazing!’. It's been a journey all these years of researching, learning and trying to find a way of expressing myself. Now that I see what I've learned it’s quite emotional.
C: Of course, and sometimes even if things are not completely perfect, it often brings something else that you weren't expecting.
A: I'm not a perfectionist in the process, when I have the final piece, I try to make it the best it can be but at the same time, if I'm talking about the body all those imperfections that you see during the process are kind of a metaphor for the scars and marks of the body, I think that's beautiful.
C: Do you find that your process can be quite experimental and fluid?
A: Definitely! For the head sculpture, I made three moulds with alginate, which is a kind of a silicone that you can use on the body and it registers the surface of the skin and the pores. It didn't work because it was too heavy, it looked like me at 70 years old. I did three of those and actually the lips were amazing, but nothing else was working. So then I tried another way of doing it, with this plaster-of-Paris, it took me a couple of weeks to decide, I was very insecure but then in the end I thought, ‘this is it’. When I see it, I see myself, but not my whole self, it's like a representation of a lot of faces. For me personally it has an expression of calm and that’s special to me because I'm not 100% that, but that’s something that I want, to be super calm, super easy.
C: It feels like your work is kind of an autobiography, and each show is leading on to the next chapter?
A: Up to now I was exploring and letting myself go where I had to. Now I see where I'm going and I think I know more about what I want to say, I don't want it to be too autobiographical, but at the same time, this body is my tool and what I know so I'm happy to see that evolution.
C: What’s been the biggest development in your work recently?
A: I think more than anything it’s the technique. It's fun because now I'm making the moulds, and the final piece is the reproduction that comes from them, they're so beautiful. The process is intense and physical, the moulds that I'm making are pretty big and heavy, so the work takes on this physicality, the body is really involved. In the last exhibition it was all fabrics and stitching, so there was a thing of going inside of myself to tell the story from a quiet place, a meditative place, letting the body express itself in a nice calm way. Now with these moulds and the big pieces of plaster, I think the body is working and feeling the heaviness of the work.
C: And has anything developed within your process and the way you've gone about creating from start to finish?
A: It’s been completely different because last time I had a little hint of what I was talking about, and I started making these embroidery pieces until I noticed the story that I was telling, it was more an unconscious way of making. This time when Martin [Mayorga] and I connected I had different ideas in my head and talking with him felt really good and made me see a way it could work. There's two pieces that did come out of the process too, an audio piece inspired by an exhibition that I saw by Chantal Ackerman in Paris. The other piece came when I was working on this research for Martin and I had all these books on my table that I read along the way, these gave me ideas and thoughts about the body, it looked so beautiful and I thought It would be amazing to make a piece like this.
C: The pieces you’ve described sound quite interactive and like they’re inviting people to fully immerse themselves in the show. Is that component important to how you present your work?
A: If I'm talking about the body I want the bodies to be there to experience it. With the forest work, if I'm talking about a sensation that I feel when I'm in the actual forest, or when I go to my father's house where I forget about myself, I would like people to get to that state. I don't know if it's a bit ambitious, but it’s important to have that experience. With the sound piece, it’s the same, in the recording there are noises from the street, and there's a moment where I get quiet and I breathe, and if you are really listening, you can feel that I'm thinking and processing. I think it's important to take time to listen.
C: To be transported into another body, and imagine being in someone else’s shoes?
A: Yeah, exactly. I think the imagination process is so beautiful, these days more than ever it’s really needed.
C: I guess to finish back where it perhaps all began, I wanted to ask you about the title of the exhibition, where did that come from?
A: The title is a line from a book that I read two summers ago by Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins. The context isn’t actually super relevant to this exhibition, it’s more the phrase that resonated, but actually the context is something that intrigues me a lot. The protagonist has both a husband and a lover and it talks a lot about the idea of having multiple lives. I'm obsessed with this idea about the amount of lives that we stop living because of the decisions we make. It's like when you decide you want to do this with your life, you are resigning another. When you asked me, what if you weren't working as a model for such a long time what do you think would have happened, and I’ll never know. I think there's something sad about that, it's not present in this exhibition, but it's something that I've been thinking about a lot since I named it and would like to maybe explore further.
‘Estaba bien ahí, donde estaba, en mi cuerpo’ by Alba Galocha, curated by Martin Mayorga will be on view at Bate Social Store in Madrid from 27th February to 15th March 2025.