Romina Malta
Interview (2025)
I’d love to hear about the environment you grew up in, and any childhood memories that might have influenced your current work.Hm… The truth is I’ve been alone since I was very young. I grew up alone. I was a child who liked being alone, and in the absence of any real parental attention, there was a kind of defiance in me whenever someone tried to tell me how things should be done. I felt the need to understand the world on my own, without anyone explaining it to me. You could say I wasn’t carrying much of a strong family influence.
I lived in a poor, noisy house on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. There was a lot of tension, and it was hard to find any space for calm or focus. My parents could barely read or write, and they didn’t have the tools to encourage any kind of learning. But inside the closet, there was this big collection of books… about history, geography, and astronomy. They didn’t belong to them or to my grandparents. I think they probably came with my father on the ship that brought him and his family from Naples to Argentina. The ship was called the Castel Verde. Many of the books were in Italian, and to me, they felt like toys. I would look at them for hours.
The house would shake about fifty times a day because it was right next to the train tracks. The walls were falling apart, and no one ever did anything about it. As a child, I didn’t register the danger… I thought the cracks and the damp were beautiful. I was fascinated by them. I guess, to cope with that environment, I built a kind of mental refuge. I’d pay attention to how objects piled up in corners, the dust, the noise from the street, the pauses between all that sound. Sometimes I would run away. No one noticed I was gone until I came back. I just wanted to know what the world outside was like, and I think that kind of sad freedom shaped who I am.
My parents always struck me as distressed, worn down by life. I felt sorry for them, but at some point I realized they weren’t my responsibility. I knew I didn’t want that kind of life for myself.
So I think my sensitivity was formed somewhere between chaos, freedom
Have any artists or thinkers—past or present—left a lasting impression on your work? Even if the impact was brief or passing, I’d love to know about any presence that left a lasting impression on you.If I think of artists, collectives, or scenes, the list of influences gets quite broad, but the most essential one for me has been Bruno Munari. I didn’t study him in depth or through an academic path, but his ideas gave me a framework to understand practices I had already been exploring intuitively. His work showed me that play can also be rigorous, and that rigor doesn’t have to become rigid but can actually be fertile ground for invention. What struck me most was his ability to move across disciplines—design, art, pedagogy, writing—with a natural ease that never lost precision but also never confined itself to a single language. That way of approaching visual thinking, both direct and didactic, taught me that coherence doesn’t come from fitting into a fixed category but from sustaining a way of thinking that stays flexible and open, able to adapt to different contexts without losing depth or expressive force. Even now I find that approach challenging, especially in a graphic environment dominated by the urgency to capture attention quickly, where the ephemeral often outweighs the processual and the reflective.