Layla Pizarro is a digital artist whose work explores memory, identity, and belonging through the lens of personal migration. Born in Chile and shaped by time in the United States, Argentina, and Mexico, she blends natural elements like wind and water with generative technology to reconstruct fragmented memories and map the emotional terrain of displacement.

This interview took place at the Hotel Saint George Hall during Art Blocks Marfa Weekend, where Layla Pizarro reflected on the emotional power of place, the beauty of transformation, and how her latest project uses wind to weave together cities, histories, and personal growth.

Edit: This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

OpenSea: Can you start with a brief introduction to yourself?

Layla Pizarro: I'm Layla Pizarro. I'm an artist. I was born in Chile, grew up a little bit there, and then my formative years were in the United States in the New Jersey, New York area. I've lived in different places since then. Every place that I move to and live in adds to where I'm from.

OpenSea: Much of your work explores memory and belonging. How does living in all these different cities show up in your work?

Layla Pizarro: At the beginning, I didn't quite understand what was going on. When I was living in Buenos Aires, which is culturally similar to Chile but very different, I started exploring where I belonged in terms of identity. I don't have roots from growing up in the United States, so I wanted to find out within the work where I belong.

I have a series that uses all the pictures from my phone over seven years. I did a training where all those pictures become one or two images, developing this memory that's not real but it's there. When I see them I think, oh, that's the place where my parents used to go, or my aunt spoke about that place. I've never been, but I could see it in those images.

With Buenos Aires, I took all the photographs I had taken, put them all together, and ran them through code so they could mix and match randomly. Now I'm working with data like wind from the city where I was born. How does that change me living in Mexico City or any other place? When I lived in the States for 15 years, what was going on in Chile when I wasn't there? What was going on in Buenos Aires when I wasn't there?

I started looking at data for sea level, putting all that information from every day for 14 years into one big piece, one algorithm that goes up and down. When you move, you cherish the place you were from and the friends you had. You think they're going to stay the same for the rest of their life, that you're going to come back and they're going to be dressed the same, be the same height. Then you go back and they're different people because they lived their own lives.

My artwork helps me deal with that. The fact that I have changed, that everyone has changed, that the landscape has changed, that I'm a different person than I was supposed to be when I was born.

OpenSea: It sounds like you've been influenced by the various places you've lived, but it's less about the places you've lived than the places you're remembering. When you're not somewhere, you're thinking about what happened in that place when you were not there and how to relate to it.

Layla Pizarro: Yes, exactly. When you're born, you're supposed to follow a path if you stay there the whole time. But as you move and live in a city for a certain amount of time, you start changing. Then they ask you where you're from, what's your favorite food, what's the tradition of the place you were born, and you're like, I don't know. My favorite food is chilaquiles and I lived in Mexico for a short time. My favorite drink is something from another country. The United States really left a mark because I was very young, then Argentina, then Mexico, then Chile. Where do I belong in this mix of things?

I'm older now. Even if I live in a new place, my accent in Spanish changes depending on who I speak to. My work grabs the environment: the wind, the sea, the terrain. We're all changing constantly, even if we stay in the same place.

I realized this year that within the art and building memory, I started mixing and matching photos from all these different places trying to create a new memory. I know I was here, I took the train there, I went here, I was walking that way, and I put them in the same image. People say memory means you always remember things exactly as they happened. You don't. You make it up as you go. With my artwork, I'm trying to make up the memories as I go and make up my history as I go. It doesn't have to be 100% real. You can add to it.

OpenSea: Each time you access a memory in your brain, you're rewriting it. You're getting a slightly degraded, slightly rewritten version of your own memory every time you access it. That's such a fascinating concept and it feels very similar to what you're talking about.

Layla Pizarro: That's exactly what I want to do. I want to remember these places because I miss them, but I want to make a new memory, a mixed mess. People who have moved, who immigrated or did other things can relate. Immigration doesn't have to be from one country to another. It could be from a small town to a bigger city, from a bigger city to a small town. When you do those movements, you create new memories. Everybody can relate to that.

I was talking to a young artist and explaining what I was doing with the wind. I have a network piece that is my ID photo, and it changes the pixels in real time with the direction of the wind, the velocity, and how fast it's going. I explained to him how you change. He said, “Oh, I came from a tiny, small town, and when I came to the big city, that’s exactly what happened.” Especially when you go back to your hometown, that's when you realize you're not the same as they are and they're not the same as you thought they would be. It's lovely. I love that. We all change. Everyone changes and everybody's living their own life.

OpenSea: It's very hard for a lot of us to embrace that because it feels scary. We're nostalgic for things staying the same. There's something very nice about you saying "I love that".

Layla Pizarro: I was totally terrified though. I was terrified to go back to Chile, especially when I went back from the States. I was terrified about how I was going to behave in that environment. Through the years, through the artwork, through the process, through mix and match, that's how I got to loving change. I don't think I would have been able to do it if I wasn't creating artwork.

OpenSea: So much of your artwork has these natural elements like wind, water, soil, and terrain. But you also use technology and generative algorithms. How does nature work with the technology aspect?

Layla Pizarro: I want to mix water from the Pacific Ocean with rainwater from Mexico City, from those three months of the rainy season. I want those two sets of water to mix. How do I do that digitally? I grab the information from one and from the other. How do I mix cultures digitally?

That's why I love experimenting. My work is conceptual and experimental. I have to mix all these things. You can't take sand from one place to another. Border control won't allow you to take those things. You can't take soil from one country to another. Every country's the same way. But you can do all that stuff digitally.

I like the randomness. When you do watercolors, you have to learn how the water works because the water's going to do whatever it does. You anticipate, but it's always random. You're never 100% sure. With the generative work, it's also random. You're also not 100% sure. In life you're also not 100% sure. It's random. That's what I like about doing digital work, because everything you cannot do physically in person, you're doing it this way.

The work I have here is eight months of wind from the city I was born in and the city I was living in at the time. The only way to mix those winds is digitally because they're too far away. It's awesome.

OpenSea: In projects like As We Are, you merge self portraits with another artist's work. What does that kind of collaboration teach you about identity?

Layla Pizarro: I love As We Are because we were talking about how a lot of people have problems. I have anxiety, or I have depression, or I'm just so happy, or my hair is not right, my body's not right. Talking to Indira [Iofeye], the artist I work with, we had long conversations about how we are humans. We're all sad, we're all happy, we're all angry at some point or another. How do we put that together? How do we accept ourselves?

As we are as people, sometimes we're starving. You want to eat and someone talks to you and you're like, “Oh no, I can't talk to you right now because you're not in the mood.” Sometimes you're sad and being sad is okay because you miss something, you've got to cry. Stuff is happening around you and you don't know how to deal with it. Cry first. That's my advice to everyone. Cry first and then worry about it because you just let it all out.

When we were talking about it, we thought, how do we do this in our way? As we are, we're just humans. We have flaws and we have things that are excellent about us. We've got to accept each other. Everyone has problems. You have problems, I have problems. Everyone has issues. I think we need to accept ourselves as we are and accept the other person as the other person is because they have flaws. I have lots. I'm on time, but it's hard for me to be on time. That's a flaw.

OpenSea: I love it. "Cry first" is going to be my new motto for everything. It's brilliant. My final question is about being in Marfa. What does being here for this weekend mean to you?

Layla Pizarro: It means a lot, mostly because of the work I'm bringing. It's called Crosswinds, which combines wind data from the city where I was born and Mexico City. This series was the first time I started with text. Usually I just sit and do it, but this time I sat down and wrote to analyze what we're doing with this and where I want to go. With the writing came the concepts and what I was going to do, connecting the idea that the medium is the message.

I’m bringing a textile piece from Latin America, using colors from South America and yarn to mix these two cities. The process required a lot of patience, doing one thing at a time. First you write the script, then you figure out how to translate that into a physical piece, then how to do the embroidery, making decisions at every step.

Along the way, I learned so much about fabric and yarn, things I didn’t know before. In my family, all my aunts sew and knit, and I eventually got to a point where I realized I needed help or I wasn’t going to finish. I started asking for help and ended up sitting on the couch with another woman, just talking while we worked. That was amazing, having that interaction and that connection with someone else.

The piece flows, and the wind makes it move. It’s meant to fully interact with the winds from Mexico City and from Marfa. This work isn’t meant to be inside. It can’t be indoors. It has to blow. If a storm comes, so be it. Things are going to happen. It means growth for me because of the work I'm bringing.

OpenSea: That's a beautiful note to end on. Thank you so much.

Layla Pizarro: Thank you.

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