On My Radar: Lidia Estepa

What’s the most creative advertising idea you’ve seen recently?

For me, creativity in advertising is born from the ability to move us emotionally. From the ability to connect worlds, to reveal the magic of the everyday; in the sacred, the feminine and in the return to essence. All the way back to the root, the centre, to the very beginning. It lives in matter and in the physical body. In deep listening. In the act of creation as pure alchemy.

This piece by the New York City Ballet, directed by Thibaut Grevet, moved me on many of these levels. I felt time soften and distort, matter a different density, another texture, even another scent. I felt close to a shift of perception, reality loosened its edges. It was an ultra-sensory, subtle journey, as if my body were awakening to a primal memory.

What website(s) do you use most regularly?

This is an impossible question for a Gemini. My world is rarely regular. I live in a state of exploration — discovering artists, reading interviews, entering the depth of their gaze, their inner worlds, the intimate vibration of their work and noticing how all of it interplays with my own.

If I had to name one place I never tire returning to, it would be Caimán Cuadernos de Cine. A Spanish digital publication that offers critical thought and auteur cinema, the language that inhabits me most deeply. Learning is one of my ways of existing in the world. Last year I immersed myself in the study of Tao, and specifically Taoist Sacred Sexuality. This deeply transformative study is gradually permeating every layer of my life.

What’s the most recent piece of tech that you’ve bought?

A few years ago, I returned to oil painting. I’ve painted since childhood, though I no longer remember when - or why - I stopped. Honestly, I don’t consider myself particularly technological, but I did recently buy a small graphic tablet. It’s light and portable, I carry it with me as just another one of my notebooks. I’ve started retouching my personal photographs again, the ones I take with my own analogue camera. 

Another pleasure I had temporarily abandoned, carried away by the speed of more seemingly pressing projects. I love it because it brings me back to painting. It’s slow and tactile and, for me, meditative. I feel as if images once again pass through my body before coming into their own, new existence outside of me.

What product could you not live without? 

I like to think there is nothing I couldn’t live without. In the end, we adapt to everything. This question actually makes me think about how many things are in our lives to make it easier and more comfortable, to help us be more 'productive', while at the same time distancing us from what is essential: from creating, from presence, from nature, from a more conscious way of inhabiting the world. Even so, if I had to name something, I would say my computer. Not as something indispensable, but as a powerful tool for creation and knowledge. An open window to the world, full of possibilities to imagine and learn and share.

What’s the best film you’ve seen over the last year?

Auteur cinema is a powerful engine for my creativity. Many films nourish me, and many more await me. But if I have to name one from last year, I would say All We Imagine as Light, by Payal Kapadia. It’s just so beautiful; a living poetry of the everyday. Each frame is drenched with emotion, as if from a loaded brushstroke. Beauty resides, profoundly, in the gaze of women, in how they hold themselves, how they love. There is truth, there is intimacy, there is solidarity. The film envelops you so softly yet so completely, wrapping itself around you as if in the arms of a loving heart.

Sound and silence and everything in between vibrates on a subtle frequency. Reality becomes porous and dreamlike. The tangible and the felt begin their dance together.Perhaps because the real has never been a certainty, but an experience. This vibration leads me to Romería, by Carla Simón. Returning to the root of my land is also a return to the body, to unnamed memory. Between these filmmakers runs an invisible thread: an intimate, feminine magical realism that rises from the everyday and transforms it.

In that same deep listening resonates La Chimera by Alice Rohrwacher, and Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell by Pham Thiên Ân. Films that you live in. That continue living in you.

What film do you think everyone should have seen?

Cinema is such a vast artistic territory that choosing a single work is also impossible. I think of Antonioni, Bergman, Bresson; presences that have expanded the way I see. For me, the artistic path is inseparable from spiritual searching. Mirror, by Andrei Tarkovsky, is a meditation translated into images, an act of contemplation that moves beyond the surface and invites the viewer into something transcendent. At this moment, I’m immersed in his energy, rereading Sculpting in Time, allowing his words to continue shaping my relationship with the invisible.

What’s your preferred social media platform?

I feel my time on social media has gradually dissolved. My nature asks for the body, for closeness, for long conversations that unfold unhurriedly over a coffee. And yet, in the world we inhabit, Instagram inevitably appears. I see it as a transient space where images call to one another, where artists can be discovered, where inspiration circulates, and where you can connect with someone on the other side of the world. I like to think of it as a bridge.

What’s your favourite TV show?

When answering this, my instinct is to move towards what nourishes me cinematically. I recently watched La nuit où Laurier Gaudreault s’est réveillé, by Xavier Dolan, and I like it a lot... but without doubt, if I had to name an essential reference, it would be Twin Peaks. Lynch’s dreamlike mysticism belongs to another world, one rooted in experience and the shifting of perception, to subtle forms of expression. A language that inhabits the unsaid, what is not seen with the eyes but is seen with the heart.

I was very young when the series first aired, but even so I remember how it permeated me. I was already deeply connected to Lynch’s work, and Twin Peaks only intensified that feeling. It's strange, supernatural atmosphere has been a constant source of inspiration. Discovering such artistic depth within a series, lived almost as a cinematic experience, was deeply sustaining for me. Lynch’s creative and aesthetic universe has accompanied me throughout my entire creative development, a persistent presence, a pulse that continues to shape the way I look.

What’s your favourite podcast?

I’ve discovered many artists and new ways of understanding photography, through The Messy Truth: Conversations on Photography by Gem Fletcher. A space for honest dialogue that is always respectful, inspiring and often unconventional conversation between creators.

The Nature Of, by Willow Defebaugh - editor in chief of Atmos - evokes for me the essential connection between the wisdom of nature and the creative act. Returning to the body, listening to feminine cycles intertwined with those of Mother Earth, and coming back to the elemental has sustained my universe in recent times. Returning to the root. Creating from the ground, from the living pulse that maintains everything.

What have you been most inspired by recently?

Life itself is a constant source of inspiration. From pausing to contemplate the infinite shades of green in the trees, to ritualising my relationship with the elements, with the earth. That's where my roots are born; from there, everything else unfolds. Photography has always been my first anchor. During the creative process of my upcoming project, certain presences have emerged: the extreme, enigmatic femininity of Francesca Woodman; the everyday intimacy of Lisa Sorgini’s universe; and Black Eyes, a documentary by Mateo Arango that explores ancestral Kazakh hunting traditions and the essential place of women within them.

If you could only listen to one music artist from now on, who would it be?

Naming a single artist wouldn’t be enough. Music is vibration, frequency — a living energy capable of transporting us to other layers of reality. I’m deeply moved by collaborating with musicians, entering into creative dialogue and shaping, together, the original music that inhabits my projects. 

It’s a process of shared listening and of ritual creation. Speaking of the sound universe I’m immersed in right now, it’s intimately linked to the development of my next project: the root, folklore, tradition, womanhood and ritual, approached through a global lens. In this landscape resonate voices such as Camarón de la Isla, Violeta Parra, Lina Guessoussi, Stephan Micus, Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, Mehdi Nassouli; sounds deeply connected to the earth that summon memory and spirit.

If there was one thing you could change about the advertising industry, what would it be?

That we could meet again through emotion. Through shared experience and deep feeling. I long for more space for creativity as a territory of connection, especially in a society where consumption will not cease to exist, but with the hope that it can evolve into something more human, more conscious. I believe in the potential of brands as carriers of voice: capable of generating positive impact, opening questions, accompanying processes and, perhaps, even illuminating the world a little more.