A Conversation With Martin Sati

Martin Sati imagined how DAWNING looked like before anyone else did. He designed the DAWNING logo, a subtle homage to the myth of Icarus –if you look close enough, you will see the profile of Icarus’ face and one of his wax wings.

Since then, Martin Sati has collaborated with DAWNING on different projects. He is our featured artist for 2024, creating two original pieces for the DAWNING home page. Over the past two years, he has created a series of paper sculptures inspired by our project Pipe Dreams, an immersive investigation into how water scarcity impacts the rights of women and girls in Kenya, soon to be published as a book by FotoEvidence.

We spoke with Martin recently at his studio in the Triana neighborhood of Seville, Spain, about his approach to art and artisanship, his creative influences, and the challenges he faced in his work for Pipe Dreams.

The following interview was conducted via live translation. It has been edited for clarity and length.

Tell us about your life and the path that led you to become a visual artist.

First, I don’t consider myself an artist, but rather an artisan. I feel most comfortable in popular culture and design–working with my hands, among the people, only touching lightly on high culture. I work at the intersection of high art, popular art, and design.

I studied fine arts in Seville, and graphic design in Winchester, in the UK. Soon after finishing school, I started a company here in Seville to take on clients for my graphic design work and started connecting with advertising agents. That was the beginning.

Was there a certain moment, then, when you felt your identity as an artisan solidify? Or was it a more gradual process?

It was an evolution. I started reading more and experimenting with different visual styles. My work is all project-based, so when I receive an assignment, I immerse myself in it. Through that process, I started to explore how to combine these different elements of pop art and graphic design.

How were you able to satisfy the needs of clients while also exploring your own artistic interests?

As I got older, I felt the need to have my own voice and express myself in ways that went beyond the interests of a client. So now, every time I work with a client, I’m trying to express my own voice while also going beyond what they want. My own voice is not related to selling something –it’s more related to communicating an idea or expressing a concept.

Does that always work, or are there times when your artistic goals conflict with the client’s desires?

Working with a client often involves sacrifice. I work with many brands, and I display some of the resulting work on my website because I’m proud to have it as part of my portfolio. You can’t help projecting your artistic vision into everything you do, and that’s why people call you, because they like your work.

Did you feel you had to sacrifice when working with DAWNING?

[Laughs] No, really there are a lot of things I have in common with DAWNING, so it’s very easy. Ultimately, we’re trying to communicate a vision and to reach people. It’s very much a shared objective.

This process of becoming an artisan – was it something you were drawn to during childhood, or was it later in life?

I started as a child, drawing like any other kid. There were people who told me that I drew really well, and I believed it. But the artisan really was born when I started reading, investigating, and imagining a specific world that was removed from the innocence of childhood. I think of my work as being very scientific; there’s a lot of investigation and research involved before putting something on the canvas.

Who are your main influences? Whether they be artists, scientists, novelists, etc.

Well, I’m kind of like an unfaithful lover. I have many influences, but I don’t follow them throughout life–I change very frequently. I get a lot of inspiration from both painting and popular art. I’ve studied the work of Luis Gordillo, but I also really like and admire Shepard Fairey. But a lot of my inspiration also comes from reading psychology, philosophy, and lately, biology.

What about your inspiration for DAWNING?

With the latest work I did for DAWNING, in Pipe Dreams, I was influenced by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, mainly their concept of the rhizome. This DAWNING project is all about water: The scarcity of it, and how to find it.

When I first read the book draft two years ago, my first idea was to go on Google Maps and try to find the wells and dry riverbeds in Turkana, Kenya, to see where the water is. How it relates to nearby roads, and how people try to reach it. What I created in the end are these imagined maps where you can see the ink falling, like water.

DAWNING doesn’t understand issues by going to institutions or the establishment. DAWNING goes to the ground level and talks to people, trying to understand the problem. I tried to do the same in this case. It was almost like the maps were blueprints for a deeper understanding – trying to get at the root of the issue and seeing how it grows from there.

What you’re describing feels like an example of the process you mentioned earlier, of scientific investigation.

DAWNING tells human stories, and they’re often very tough stories. But there’s also a kind of poetry to these projects that lies not only in the stories of human pain but in the analysis that results. What I was trying to do was distill the visual elements of the story in a way that’s complementary to it.

So, instead of going into each individual story of hardship, I tried to get a birds-eye view of the issue, and to convey what this search for water feels like in a visual form. What I was interested in was the movement –the human movement to the source of water. Not having been there, it was an honest effort to capture a phenomenon from afar.

With your work, there is often a rootedness in reality, but it can also be very abstract. How do you think about the role of abstraction in your work?

In a way, whether the work manifests as abstract depends on my point of view. If I had been on the ground in Kenya with the DAWNING team, my work for Pipe Dreams would have been completely different. But the way I went about it led to the ultimate form being abstract. So, in any project, the most important elements are where I’m standing, and the people I’m trying to reach.

I also have to make decisions about which emotions I want to bring to a project, and the intensity of those emotions. I can be funny, I can be light, or I can be dark. In the case of Kenya, I knew that I was looking at it from the outside, and that informed my approach, and the type of emotion I brought to the project.

I imagine it was difficult to approach the Pipe Dreams project from so far away, in your studio in Seville, and still create something authentic to you as an artist.

It’s not a question so much of authenticity as it is being serious about my work. I can’t pretend I was there, speaking with people and empathizing with them. I wasn’t going to pretend I had emotions that I didn’t have. It would have been cynical on my part to try to pretend I had a ground-level view. That was why I took the analytical, investigative approach, trying to represent something I had not firsthand experience of.

In general, what do you find exciting about working with DAWNING, and what would you feel challenged by in the future?

I find it exciting because it’s an attempt to go after the truth. The projects are real. So I can create work that’s connected to things that are actually happening –it’s not marketing data that’s arriving on my desk so that I can help sell something. It’s based on testimonials in the field, and efforts to create a respectful representation of what people are experiencing.

The ultimate challenge would be to join the DAWNING team in the field for a project, because my work usually requires the time, reflection and analysis that I get in my studio. But going to the field is not off the table. Maybe one day we’ll find the right opportunity.