Meet Mica Tzara

We recently connected with Mica Tzara and have shared our conversation below.

Mica, so excited to have you with us today. So much we can chat about, but one of the questions we are most interested in is how you have managed to keep your creativity alive.

As a multidisciplinary artist, I believe that creativity is enhanced by sharing it with other artists. To be open to that necessary exchange with others, to generate networks, community. Being on the move and getting to know other cultures has always helped me to keep creativity alive.
Another thing that helps me a lot for inspiration is to feel the cities where I live even once a week as if I were a tourist. I take time to go to museums, walk in the parks, ride my bike, sit and watch the river or the sea depending on where I am.
It is very difficult for me to be still in one place, sometimes it is something positive that helps to feed creativity and sometimes it is exhausting and there is little time left for artistic production but I always carry with me a notebook to write down ideas that at some point I will develop. I try to find a balance between time dedicated to work and leisure and creative spaces, although being a tattoo artist my work is very creative, sometimes I have to make a stop and give some space to other media so that it doesn’t become routine. I don’t know if I have achieved it yet but I am working on it.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

I was born in Argentina, I grew up in a small town on the Atlantic coast called Necochea. I moved to Buenos Aires to studied a degree in visual arts with a major in engraving and printed art. During my years of academic formation I was very restless and explored various media such as photography, performance, drawing, printmaking and silkscreen among others. Always having as a starting point the relationship between art and the body. I think of the body as a moving map, a refuge and a space for action. When I started tattooing it was not a surprise, as I had been developing concepts such as skin as a symbolic surface in other more performative works. Although in the last 7 years the tattoo has filled a great part of my artistic work, I try to develop in parallel other supports and ideas.
With my illustrations I have worked on several album covers and I have also actively participated in the French publishing house Éditions Blast, which publishes books by anti-racist, feminist, queer and anarchist writers. A book will soon be published by the Mexican publishing house Espiritu, of which I had the honor of being part along with great fellow writers and illustrators.
At the moment I am exploring my images as a VJ, digitally and analogically, and I have had the pleasure of accompanying live musicians that I admire a lot as Bethu Avendaño, Kumbia Queers (in their visit to NYC), and Federico Casalinuovo with whom we made in the year 2023 in Buenos Aires a visual and musical performance called “A volcano is an eruption body”.
Since August 2023 I live in New York and from that base I travel approximately twice a year to Oaxaca, where I lived for 4 years and where I share a beautiful project called Trueno with other queer artists. This project is a space that was born in the company of my friend Aminta Espinoza (@soyunmusgotengosed) as a tattoo studio but has been mutating according to the needs of our own lgbtiq+ community. The doors are open to workshops, screenings, lectures, performance, etc, having as a premise the care, accompaniment and respect for something as sacred as the transformation of our body and our desire. It is our home, our refuge from so much hostility.
The tattoo community and the networks around this craft have taken me to beautiful places and introduced me to wonderful artists. Last year I was invited to participate in the framework of Pan Asian American Heritage Month at Yale University for a panel discussion with other colleagues and it was a very rich experience in terms of exchange and feedback from both the students on campus and the organizers. I am still very excited and looking forward to what the future holds for me.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

The 3 qualities that most influenced my path I would say were trusting the process, being open to learning from the exchange with others and observing.
The advice I would give is to be true to yourself and trust in your ability to create, it doesn’t matter if the first time goes wrong, the whole creative process is language and as language we are alive and constantly changing and learning, you should not be so critical of yourself and what you are trying to develop.

One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?

As I said before, I feel it is fundamental to connect with other artists and networks. I am always open to work in collaboration with others, especially in these times in which the advance of right-wing policies in both the global north and south seeks to make us more and more disintegrated.
From Trueno, our studio in Oaxaca, we are open to call all queer artists who want to participate either tattooing or bringing other proposals.
In New York I also participate in a space that has made me feel at home, The High Priestess, a Latino-owned space that promotes a meeting place for the queer Latino community in NYC.
The first year in New York was quite a challenge and I think it is complex as a migrant to arrive in a new city and feel at home quickly. I wish for this 2025 more projects together with other artists and the possibility of articulating spaces for artistic production. Always open to explore different media and contribute from what I do in other projects that dialogue and feed back with my work.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: tzara_tzara
• Other: TRUENO : instagram.com/trueno.trueno.trueno
  THE HIGH PRIESTESS : instagram.com/thehighpriestessbk

Image Credits

For the first picture of myself and also the one of the performance with visuals the photographer was Leandro Rodriguez