Parlá Frères: U.T.O.P.I.A. — Colette, Paris (2012)
An Interview with José and Rey Parlá
By Alexandre Stipanovich
Brooklyn, New York

This conversation between José Parlá and Rey Parlá was recorded in Brooklyn in 2012, just ahead of their joint exhibition Parlá Frères: U.T.O.P.I.A. at the internationally renowned Parisian concept store Colette. Curated by Colette’s visionary founder Sarah Andelman, the show marked a rare convergence of the brothers’ creative practices—melding José’s calligraphic abstractions with Rey’s experimental photography and text-based visual poetry into one immersive, layered language.

Colette (1997–2017), located at 213 Rue Saint-Honoré, was not just a boutique, but a cultural catalyst—a living moodboard for contemporary visual culture. Known for debuting talents like KAWS, Virgil Abloh, and Futura, the store blurred boundaries between art, fashion, music, and design. To exhibit there was to enter a cross-disciplinary dialogue that resonated far beyond the art world’s usual frames.

The exhibition title, U.T.O.P.I.A., drawn from a dream and reimagined as a poetic acronym—Underground Traveling Operating Psychogeographical Intelligence Agency—became a platform for the brothers’ shared vision: a mobile zone of memory, resistance, and invention. Informed by their Cuban heritage, diasporic consciousness, and street-level observations of cities in flux, the exhibition offered new paintings, photographs, and mixed-media works that transformed language into terrain and history into atmosphere.

Launched in September 2012, at the height of global post-crash uncertainty, U.T.O.P.I.A. resonated with the political and poetic energies of its time. It reflected not only the brothers’ personal journey—from Miami to Puerto Rico to New York—but also the wider need to imagine new forms of sovereignty, expression, and collaboration across borders.

In this dialogue, guided by writer and neuropharmacologist Alexandre Stipanovich, José and Rey reflect on their artistic origins, fraternal bonds, and the interplay between memory and experimentation in their lives and work. The exchange captures a pivotal moment in their ongoing story—when two distinct voices converge to speak in unison, drawing the map of an imagined place where painting and photography, exile and imagination, studio and street all find common ground.

Parlá Frères: U.T.O.P.I.A.
A Conversation Between José Parlá and Rey Parlá

| Interview by Alexandre Stipanovich |

ALEXANDRE STIPANOVICH (AS): Tell us about your next show, U.T.O.P.I.A.

JOSÉ PARLÁ (JP): The title came from a dream I had years ago—an island that moved across the globe, disguised as land but actually a ship. It was ruled entirely by artists, with no government, no rules. But it had a high-tech defense system. In the dream, only artists could find it. They created and built freely, but sometimes had to hide from outside threats. That dream came from feelings about migration and censorship—how artists need freedom to thrive. It lingered in my mind, and over time, Rey and I started talking about how that vision could become something real.

REY PARLÁ (RP): José’s dream turned into something else for me: an acronym—U.T.O.P.I.A. became the Underground Travelling Operating Psychogeographical Intelligence Agency. Around the same time, I was reading Thomas More’s Utopia, where two characters debate knowledge—one through books, the other through travel. That became us: José, the traveler. Me, the writer. And between us, that ongoing conversation. We even formed a project called The New Grand Tour based on the idea that real education requires movement and experience. It was the fusion of dreams, text, and shared memory that gave life to this show.

AS: So how are your styles blending in this exhibit?

JP: Collaboration has always been there. Since we were kids. Sometimes it’s on canvas, but it’s also in conversation, in documenting each other, in building titles. I paint, Rey documents, but even that’s blurry. Rey also paints with light and movement—his camera-less photography is abstract in a different way. Our styles evolved together, side by side.

RP: Our dialogue lives in the space between our gestures. My Super 8 films and scratches on negatives began around the same time José was layering city walls into calligraphic memory. We shared a table at home—me with a Bolex and José with his markers. Sometimes the projector would catch fire mid-edit. But it was never about perfection. It was about experimentation, the act of making. Deterioration and rebirth. Life and process.

AS: Do you think the first graffiti writers in NYC and prehistoric cave artists were expressing the same human instinct?

JP: Absolutely. It’s about leaving a mark—saying “I was here.” That instinct runs through architecture, poetry, boxing, anything really. Mark-making is survival.

RP: The line carries meaning. It’s the thread of evolution. And abstraction? That’s where we go when we don’t yet have words.

AS: Who initiated you into art? What’s your earliest memory of that creative impulse?

RP: In Puerto Rico, I remember writing a poem about Don Quixote and our neighbor, who was on TV. I showed it to our father, who had been a teacher in Georgia in the 1960s. He loved it. Both our parents had beautiful handwriting. Their penmanship was its own art. Later, I discovered photography, then filmmaking. But writing always came first.

JP: I drew all the time as a kid. Our mom would help me understand line and proportion. Then Rey and some friends introduced me to the writing styles coming from New York. Wild Style changed my life. I started painting and breakdancing at the same time. Even now, I paint like I’m dancing. Rhythm is part of the process.

AS: Your Cuban heritage is vivid in your works—the color, the light. But you didn’t grow up in Cuba. Is it nostalgia?

RP: We were born in Miami, spent our early years in Puerto Rico. Cuba was always there—through our parents, our language, the food, the stories. But nostalgia might not be the word. Maybe it’s a kind of secondhand memory—absorbed through culture, environment, exile.

JP: In a Cuban household, the island is a state of mind. Even in Florida, our home was Cuba. My first language was Spanish. Our mom didn’t speak English. Our dad spoke five languages and gave us homework translating encyclopedias. Cuba was real because it shaped our worldview—even if we didn’t live there.

RP: When we went to Havana years later, people thought we were locals. That connection was in us already.

AS: Your careers started separately—Rey in photography and filmmaking, José in street art. How did the collaboration mature?

RP: I wouldn’t call it a career, exactly—it was a phase of experimentation. I started with graffiti, then photography, then film. We were side by side the whole time. Even when we weren’t in the same city, we were in dialogue. Later, we formalized that exchange with collaborative shows.

JP: The media called it “graffiti,” but inside the culture we were “Writers.” Rey and I always talked about the ephemeral quality of walls—how things get painted over, layered, lost. That led us to abstraction. The early Bolex films Rey made with my markers on the strips… we were already collaborating before we had the language for it.

AS: You’ve both traveled widely. How did that shape the work?

JP: I moved to New York in the 90s, which opened the world. Tokyo was one of our first big international invitations. We showed in China, Cuba, Paris. The New Grand Tour took us across Asia and back to New York. Travel became part of the practice—part of how we processed and made sense of memory.

RP: Traveling wasn’t just physical—it was energetic. We exchanged music, glances, ideas. Sometimes we didn’t even trade art—we traded presence.

AS: Both of you work in abstraction, but the emotional tones feel different. José, your work feels public. Rey, yours feels internal.

RP: We’re different people, shaped by the same lineage. My work looks inward—poetry, shadow, archive. I’m processing silence and language. José looks outward—walls, crowds, music. But our lines intersect.

JP: Abstraction is a language. My studio is a stage. Sometimes I perform in silence. Sometimes to music. Sometimes the city itself makes the gesture. But even then, it’s my internal vision of the outside.

AS: Are your works antithetical—one fluid, one rigid?

RP: No, they’re parallel. Different branches, same root. My lines may be scratched, his brushed—but they come from motion and reflection.

JP: Rey’s lines feel like tunnels, like conduits. They move through frames and time. Mine are rhythm, calligraphy, pulse. They mirror who we are.

AS: Do you collect miracles?

JP: I collect voices. Paper. Drips. Dance. Not miracles—just evidence.

RP: We’ve always been collectors. Of traces. Of time. This collaboration? Maybe it’s the U.T.O.P.I.A. we dreamed about. No place, no center, just freedom.