Jéssica Ilfu-Soi

Please share a bit about yourself and your background.

I’m a self-taught multidisciplinary artist, born in Angola and living in Lisbon for most of my life. I’m a child of the Diaspora, my roots stretch between Africa and Asia, and growing up in such a mixed cultural context shaped my perception of identity through multiple lenses and layers. Since an early age, art has been a way of self-expression, I was always sketching, painting, making collages, sewing clothes. Later I studied Translation in college, even though I always knew that wasn’t really my path. Over the years, I explored writing and design, yet the urge to create with my hands never left. It stayed quietly in the background, until it became impossible to ignore. Eventually, I stopped looking elsewhere and decided to dedicate myself fully to artistic practice.

What first drew you to sculpting and mixed media, and how did these mediums become central to your creative expression?

I needed a material that could move with me, something I could shape freely without too many limits, something that could give physical form to what lived in my imagination. That’s how clay came into my hands. As I began working with it, it felt like the material had its own will. You don’t simply shape clay, it shapes you back. It resists, reacts, transforms. I like that relationship, it’s physical, intuitive, and unpredictable.

It allows me to merge it with other materials, to experiment, to let things evolve. I often work with hair, plaster, concrete, papier mâché… materials with different weights and tempers. They help me stretch the language of sculpture and explore new textures and meanings. Over time, I started bringing in other layers too like sound, video, and sensorial elements in order to give a wider body to my ideas. It all feels connected, like a single organism that keeps unfolding.

How have the landscapes, traditions, and cultural heritage of your upbringing influenced your work? 

I think it permeates, first without noticing, as a byproduct of a certain context, some references stay with us and leak seamlessly into whatever we are doing or creating. Later, I became more aware of that and started to bring it in intentionally, inserting elements of my cultural heritage. Ancestry became a central part of my work, a way to honour the people who came before me, and the knowledge that travels through them. I think a lot about how things transform, how they survive time, how they carry pieces of memory.

What does your creative process look like? Do you have any rituals that help you enter a state of flow?

As soon as I enter the studio, I light sage or palo santo and put on some music, it helps me set the tone and shift into a different state of mind. Most of the time, I go straight into working with the pieces, sometimes I sketch, but only as a visual note or reference, the final piece never looks like what’s on paper. The process itself is what defines the form. I tend to question my works as I go: what do they want to become, which direction should I take, is it time to stop or can I go further? This helps me somehow, to listen rather than control.

Working with your hands and materials calls for time and presence. How does the physical act of sculpting shape your emotional state and your sense of connection to self, ancestry, and memory?

To work with my body is a sacred thing. It taught me to see the body as a vessel that once it’s open and receptive, it can channel ideas, emotions, and memories, transforming them into boundless forms. Sculpting brings many states, it can be hypnotic, trance-like, it is challenging and at the same time highly cathartic and freeing. For me, it’s very introspective, it opens space for reflection, for observing what circles inside. It often feels like a mirror, it awakens things and even in silence, it can be loud.

Looking at the contemporary craft landscape, where do you see the greatest opportunities for preserving and reinterpreting important local traditions?

I believe by a continuous sense of curiosity of what preceded us. Craft carries traces of time, of people and places, of ways of doing and being that survived through hands. Its strength lies in keeping that conversation alive. I believe that it’s not about freezing tradition but allowing it to mutate. For me, it’s important to merge the traditional with the experimental and to preserve the spirit of the technique while letting it transform through new materials, contexts, and stories. That’s how tradition survives, through change, not imitation.

Are there any new projects, themes, or directions you are currently exploring that feel particularly connected to your practice?

Lately I’ve been drawn to explore transformation and cycles, how things are constantly shifting between states of existence and disappearance. I’m working on new pieces that explore polar opposites and dualities: presence and void, form and erosion, earth and cosmos. I’ve also been integrating sound and movement more boldly, allowing the work to expand beyond the object and into a sensory experience. I’m interested in how materials, sound, and the body can communicate what words cannot and how they can hold emotion and open consciousness all at once.

How can people engage more closely with your work?

At the moment, my work is being shown at the Venice Design Biennial until early November.

Online, you can find more of my practice and ongoing projects through instagram and on my website, both are spaces where I share updates, behind-the-scenes moments, and new pieces as they come to life.

Photo [1, 2, 5, 6, 7] by @anastasia.khibova
Photo [3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10] by @lytakai @thesimplestudio
Photo [11, 12, 13, 14] by @anapierce