REY PARLA

Interview by Ela Perşembe for ESCAPE Magazine (Istanbul)

In conjunction with the exhibition Between Humankind & Nature at Vision Art Platform, Istanbul, curated by İpek Yeğinsü

Ela Perşembe: Can you speak about the work you created for Between Humankind & Nature?

Rey Parla: The exhibition’s title struck me as an invocation—like a prayer uttered in the pause between cause and effect. "Nature" conjured the image of a forest, but not just any forest. I envisioned a Human Forest—one marked by the invisible signatures of our collective impact. And "between humankind" made me think of the historical fingerprint we’ve etched into the earth.

This brought me back to my “Scratch-Graph” process: a visual technique of scratching, scoring, and etching directly into the emulsion of photographic film. These marks form an invented topography—networks of fictional ley lines—mapping the scars left behind by industry, time, and trauma. It’s a kind of forensic fiction, like climate change itself: unseen until its damage becomes unignorable.

Paul Klee once said, “A line is a dot that went for a walk.” That idea speaks to me. In The Human Forest, each line becomes a path through this shifting wilderness—both literal and metaphorical. What happens when human intention collides with natural force? When we realize, too late, that the canopy has been replaced by the grid? This work is my attempt to reconcile that question, through an abstract cartography of reckoning.

Ela Perşembe: How do your roots and background inform your practice?

Rey Parla: Roots are not just inherited—they’re constructed, observed, reimagined. In my case, they're hybrid, layered between cultures, cities, and languages. I was born in New York, raised in a Cuban household, and drawn to storytelling from an early age. My first serious artmaking came through filmmaking, where I learned that every material—light, silence, footage, even time—could be sculpted. That sense of formal openness remains central to my practice.

I approach photography not just as a document but as a site of invention. The film negative itself becomes terrain. When I scratch into it, I’m writing—sometimes elegies, sometimes manifestos, often both. I’ve worked across mediums—poetry, cinema, painting, photography—and I treat them all as tools of excavation. Memory, myth, evidence—they’re all layers I dig through.

Ultimately, it’s about resourcefulness. That immigrant mindset: nothing is wasted. Everything is material.

Ela Perşembe: How does connecting with nature—or losing that connection—influence your work?

Rey Parla: If you grow up in a city, “nature” isn’t a backdrop—it’s a void. It becomes the negative space around our urban condition. In that sense, nature is what we’ve lost the ability to see clearly. And that absence is as potent as any presence.

In The Human Forest, I imagine a place where natural and industrial histories blur—where trees are overwritten by highways and shoreline becomes scaffolding. These aren’t literal depictions, but symbolic intersections of our ecological and psychological geographies. We’ve mapped the earth with our ambition, but those maps are starting to blur with heatwaves, floods, and firestorms.

Artists like Teresita Fernández—whose work I deeply admire—visualize those same dislocations. Her ability to materialize weather, absence, and memory has influenced how I think about landscape. We’re no longer separate from the crises we create. We’re entangled. That tension is what I try to surface.

Ela Perşembe: Why is local immersion and artisanship important in your life and work?

Rey Parla: I’m a father, and part of my practice is sharing moments of cultural immersion with my children—whether that’s in Brooklyn, upstate New York, or traveling abroad. Artisanship is a form of reverence. It slows things down. Whether it's a handmade object, a brushstroke on a ceramic, or a gesture in the street—it speaks a visual language that reconnects us to process, labor, care.

Since COVID-19, many large-scale gatherings disappeared, but smaller rituals of making endured. I find meaning in that. Local craft reminds me that every surface, every topography, is shaped by hand and time. Cities reveal this, too—if you know where to look.

I don’t see nature and the city as opposites. They are dual forces shaping each other. In that friction, I find form. In that form, I find a question. That’s where the work begins.

*Interview originally published in ESCAPE Magazine, Istanbul by Ela Perşembe