Our words have brought us this far. Only our actions will take us further. This is the title of the first EP from Cora Novoa’s Mental Diary trilogy… And it’s also a raw declaration of intentions, it’s those kinds of loud smacks on the back of the neck that, when delivered at the right moment, they propel you forward to stop with the talking and to start doing. To achieve whatever you want to achieve. And what Cora Novoa wants to achieve is very clear: to make a giant leap into her career.
CORA NOVOA AND THE ART OF LOSING
Cora Novoa finds herself right at the halfway point of her most personal project: Mental Diary , an album that’s divided into three EPs and the second chapter, The Art of Losing, is about to come out. The artist will officially present it at our Barcelona store tomorrow Friday the 26th of April. We take this opportunity to talk with her, or in other words, we dive head-first into her own kind of spider’s web.
And you could say that her career has been chock-full of these kinds of death-defying somersaults without a safety net: she started to DJ in a practically masculine –and powerfully sexist– world that is the electronic music scene, she made a name for herself without having the need to fight her way into it, only delivering good sessions, and she started producing her own songs. She created Seeking The Velvet as a spider’s web whose heart is the music, but with threads that are directed at fashion, the audiovisual and any other creative area that can vibrate in tune to Novoa’s imagery.
And, now, Mental Diary. An album divided into three chapters whose names already speak for themselves: it’s a mental diary that encapsulates a very specific era in the author’s life. She closed the year 2018 with the first EP Russian Bells, and the second one, inspired by a poem by Elizabeth Bishop, is about to come out under the name of The Art of Losing. It will come accompanied by an audiovisual proposal that reaffirms Cora Novoa’s ability to illuminate her projects as neural networks that, based on creative hyperlinks, are enriching the central discourse with other peripheral discourses that form a solid and fascinating whole. It’s hypnotic. The metaphor stays there: neural networks, spiders’ webs. Beautiful traps in which it seems easy –and pleasant– to get trapped in.
Sweatshirt OAKLEY BY SAMUEL ROSS.
The project called Mental Diary is a new phase in your career for which you’ve had to give it all you’ve got… How are you feeling about it?
This is the most grandiose project I’ve done to date. Each project I involve myself in is more ambitious than the one before and, after I’m done with it, I always say that the next one will be simpler, more minimal and to the point. And I don’t know why, but each time it gets worse, because each time it requires more of an effort, taking on more responsibilities… The counterpoint, however, is that it’s about revealing yourself and showing what you’ve been working on for so long in the project. Especially with this second act.
Weren’t you afraid of exposing something that’s so intimate?
I’ve always been very cautious. I’m a very reserved person when it comes to my intimacy because I believe that it’s the best gift you could ever give to anyone. My true friends know everything about me, but I’m a very cautious and reserved person. Still, I love it when an artist opens up and explains what they’ve personally had to go through before reaching that specific moment in time. That’s beautiful. Sometimes I think that I shouldn’t tell certain things, but in this case, I don’t regret anything. I believe that it was necessary and I wanted to do it like this. It was kind of scary because people can be very critical, especially when you’re exposed to the public’s opinion, which, you know, I’m not really Madonna. But you’re exposed. The criticism is still there. And in the end, you have to do whatever you feel like doing.
Well, exposing certain intimate parts isn’t that rare: we continuously do so in social media. But it’s different to do it through art…
I’ve shown one part of it at a creative level. What I never do, and I hate doing, is exposing myself, your life becoming pornography. That’s what tabloids do, selling your private life. I can share myself at a creative level, but there aren’t brands that are paying me to publish a photo with my partner, to sell a part of myself, that overexposure. It doesn’t work with my discourse. I want people to follow me for my music, not because I’m dating a certain person.
How has the experience and reception of your first act been like?
It went very well. I have a good feeling about it. The press perfectly understood where I was coming from, which really scared me. People aren’t used to something like this, because I’m actually destructuring and decomposing an album in three parts. But the national, as well as international feedback, has been really good.
And, when it comes to the second act, how did you find the words of the poet Elizabeth Bishop and why do you find them so revealing?
I got to Bishop through one of my best friends, who’s a poet. She taught me a great lesson because she had suffered many losses in the journey of her life. And, when I was living in London, she told me she was going to show me one of her favourite poems. The poem tells you to get used to loss and losing. That this life journey is like this and there’s no bigger disaster, it all depends on how we accept it and how we see it. I find it really romantic.
Trousers JOHN ELLIOTT, shirt Nike x Matthew WILLIAMS, hooded jacket NIKE X MATTHEW WILLIAMS, shoes NIKE.
Why do you think humans are so bad at dealing with loss?
We become attached to people, things, everything… And, in the end, we’re just passing by in life. It’s cool to enjoy the present because we don’t know how long it’s going to last. Life’s about that, more than winning or losing. It’s a level of losing people, objects, sensations, entering a crisis. That’s what I evoke and what Bishop talks about in her poem.
What makes this act different from the other two?
The first act above all talks about rebuilding oneself. And this one is more about accepting, accepting reality. In the beginning, when you’re sad you can’t see beyond that sadness. Overcoming it is difficult. First, you have to rebuild yourself, and after that comes accepting reality, accepting that you’ve lost. Also, the aesthetic language in the three acts is very urban and post-internet. There has to be something that glues them together.
Is that glue the urban and post-internet aspects? Or is there another link between them?
The content is what ties the three acts together. The album came about through my experience and a vital moment. I was going through a break-up and I moved to London with the ultimate goal of finishing this project. And so the ultimate element that glues them together is my life. Capturing moods and things that I like, because at the end I make a collage of everything that motivates me. The third act, for example, will talk about the internet culture and how it affects our present and our future, from how we interact with each other and how we build our own identities.
Why are you giving the visual aspect and everything that surrounds music in this project (and generally-speaking also with Seeking The Velvet) such weight?
That’s the vision I always had and that I didn’t dare realise until I made Seeking The Velvet. That’s how I create projects: by using all of my possible creative resources. The music comes first, and around that everything else is built. That’s how I work. I love other 360 artists like, for example, Jimmy Edgar.
The third act will come out after the summer… Do you have any idea what is going to be Cora Novoa’s next big thing?
There’s this really cool cinematographic project, I’m waiting to see if it will happen in the end or not. Still, I’ll keep doing gigs, live performances and I’ll go to the studio. As always.
Trousers JOHN ELLIOTT, shirt Nike x Matthew WILLIAMS, hooded jacket NIKE X MATTHEW WILLIAMS.
Trousers JOHN ELLIOTT, shoes NIKE.
Trousers JOHN ELLIOTT, shirt Nike x Matthew WILLIAMS, hooded jacket NIKE X MATTHEW WILLIAMS, shoes NIKE.
Trousers JOHN ELLIOTT, shirt Nike x Matthew WILLIAMS, hooded jacket NIKE X MATTHEW WILLIAMS.
Trousers JOHN ELLIOTT, shoes NIKE.
Trousers RICK OWENS, sweatshirt OAKLEY BY SAMUEL ROSS, shoes NIKE.