Mar 22

Mar 22 DANIELA BENAIM BENHAMU

Art, Creative People, Culture, Fashion and Design, Interviews, Photography

FASHION STYLING & CREATIVE DIRECTION

Daniela is London-based stylist and art director from Caracas, Venezuela, whose work investigates and celebrates womanhood. Working on creative and commercial projects for fashion brands and magazines in Venezuela in times of shortages, she learned to create with scarce resources. After winning the LVMH Grand Prix Scholarship, she moved to London in 2018 to study MA Fashion Image at Central Saint Martins.

Currently, the talent is doing an internship in the Art Direction department at Burberry.

Your greatest inspirations or influences?

I'm inspired by female creators of all time, from writers like Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf, Maria Luisa Bombal and Laura Esquivel; to directors like Germaine Dulac, Fina Torres and Jennifer Kent. My work is influenced by women artists like Dorothea Tanning, Marisol Escobar, Violeta Parra, Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, and Louise Bourgeois, who have used textiles and handicrafts to subvert the relationship between women and the domestic space.

Informed by my Venezuelan roots, my images also draw from Latin American folklore and mythology, examining themes of identity, memory, migration, and nostalgia.

Tell us a bit about your creative process? Work you are most proud of, things you are looking forward to this year?

Since I'm pretty academic, pre-production is crucial in my process. I spend days researching and conceptualising. Most of my projects started as essays that I translated then into images.

For me, it's fundamental to narrate a story. I'm fascinated by the intersection between body, dress, film, literature, art and sociology, so my ideas come from novels, exhibitions, films, readings, artworks.

I love to create custom pieces for every shoot by recycling and transforming old things or props from previous projects.

For my MA final project, titled La Casa (the house in Spanish), I collaborated with photographers and artists in Caracas and London to explore the relationship between place, body and self. I used masks and dolls made with old garments that like buildings and humans, show signs of time.

I'm very much looking forward to continuing collaborating with other Latin American creatives to celebrate our culture and give more visibility to the Latinx community in the UK.

How has this year changed your creativity or how you see the world changing moving forward?

This year has been super intense and challenging in a good way. I have learned to deal better with uncertainty, cultivate my patience and embrace both the quiet and the hectic times.

I've decided to be optimistic about the future.

I think these times are helping us remember what is truly important. I hope we are becoming more conscious and critic as both creators and consumers. I'm confident that all the challenges and crises will make us more adaptable and creative.