Who Am I and What I Think About Creation

My name is Seele, I’m 28 years old, and I live in Mexico City. I’m a collage artist, but I didn’t study visual arts or anything similar—rather, I studied Hispanic Literatures in college.

Since I’ve always loved reading, I chose that path and even worked for quite a while as a style editor, refining texts for clarity and flow in Spanish. I always knew I had an inclination toward the arts, but now I want to explore something different from literature, and I believe collage has been the key that opened the door to that new world for me.

It’s both amazing and deeply moving to me how my personal interests—those I often haven’t managed to express—can find a place in my pieces.

It’s not my intention to say that a career defines your entire identity, but I believe that in this system we live in, a profession can strongly shape how we see ourselves. Although I appreciate what I learned at the university, I can’t forget how many times I heard professors say, especially in the first days of college, that the Hispanic Literatures program wasn’t meant to turn us into writers. They took from us the possibility of creating, and that was a lie I believed for a long time. I didn’t just think I couldn’t write—I thought I wasn’t capable of creating at all.

Back then I didn’t want to be a writer, but now that I reflect on it, I’m deeply frustrated that such a possibility was taken from us at such a young age. Nowadays, I’m more and more convinced that the ability to create—not only artistically, but in any form—is what brings us closer to our true selves and we must stick to that belief.