Tec Fase is a Brazil-based artist who constructs socially engaged digital collages from urban imagery. He captures video fragments of cities — roads, tunnels, graffiti — and layers them into dense, animated compositions, ranging from fully abstract assemblages to bold portraits in which faces and busts emerge. Central to his practice is the deliberately "unimpressive" nature of his raw footage: rather than focusing on a city’s iconic or clichéd landmarks, he turns to its most ordinary surfaces: walls, pavements, underpasses. His work seeks to reveal a truer portrait of the city, shaped by what its inhabitants actual lived experience. In this way, Tec Fase creates "B-portraits" of cities, exposing their real identities that lie beneath the veneer of postcards and stereotypes.
People sometimes ask me how long it takes me to make a digital collage. My answer is always: thirty years. Because it’s not like one day I suddenly decided, OK, I’ll get a drone and make a portrait now.
I started by working in the street: at first, I painted walls. But when I moved to São Paulo, painting walls became very complicated, as graffiti there follows a very specific code. Certain tags belong to marginal groups, sometimes gangs, and you simply can’t cover them. Even if a tag is old, it’s almost considered archaeological. Covering it can cause serious problems. Because of that, I moved to painting the ground, and would photograph these works from above. This evolution wasn’t driven by a pure creative decision, but by context and problem-solving. It was empirical. I tried the wall, the wall was impossible, so I moved to the floor. One thing led to another.
My move toward digital collage came later, during the pandemic. During confinement, I was at home constantly. I had five or six years’ worth of drawings saved on my computer. I started looking at all that material and thought: OK, maybe I can make something out of this. NFTs were everywhere at the time. I tried them out briefly, but I quickly realized it wasn’t for me. I respect it, I understand it, but it’s not how I want to work. I like the idea that a collector lives with the work, puts it on their wall, shares it — not that they immediately resell it to make money. That logic didn’t feel right to me.
I do love technology, and I see it as a good way to show my works around the world. I struggled for years with shipping. I had opportunities to show work internationally, but sending large physical pieces across the world is expensive and complicated. Digital work suddenly made it possible to share my work globally, simply by sending a link or a Google Drive folder. At the same time, I was at a moment in my life where travel wasn’t easy. I have two young daughters. Family life makes it impossible to say, "I’ll go to Korea for a month to prepare an exhibition." So there were many factors — logistical, personal, practical — that pushed me toward digital creation.
What emerged from all of this felt natural. It’s a continuation of what I was already doing with drones and urban space. Everything connects. These digital creations work very well with the stories I’ve been telling all along.
I first need to really understand the city I’m working with. I don’t start by capturing footage randomly: I choose four or five locations that I feel have to be included, and just as importantly, deciding what not to include is also a big decision. For Rio, for example, I didn’t want the Christ the Redeemer statue or the beach. For Paris, I don’t want the Eiffel Tower… I want to show another side of the city.
For my process, it’s best to work with images that have a wide range of lighting conditions. For example, cloudy days are actually the best to film for me, as they’ll determine whether a clip has shadows or not. I have certain aesthetic lighting that I like to work with, or even particular hours to film at. If I want to show traffic, for example, I’ll film during rush hour, when there are a lot of cars in the details, which is crucial to the final composition.
When it comes to filming, I work with my own drone and a pilot. The technology is incredible, the drone moves super fast nowadays — we’ll be in an Uber, I’ll say "stop here," and we’ll launch the drone straight from the car window. The pilot is a close friend of mine, and we’ve been working together for about eight years. He started as my art assistant, helping me with painting and murals, and over time he became an excellent drone filmmaker. I’d love to travel with him everywhere and film each city together. After working together for so long, he understands which parts of a city attract me, which colors I like to work with. This is essential: that he knows me and my work deeply.
Firstly, I don’t have the talent of drawing realistically. In the beginning, when I started paying attention to art, I remember being a child, in a clinic in Argentina, and seeing Miró posters. I asked my father: this is an art piece? He said yes, Miró is a big artist. And I looked at it and thought: it’s like two colors. I can do that. He told me to do it. So I started copying Miró’s drawings. It was beautiful because Dali was impossible, but Miró was possible.
Then I met Basquiat. Basquiat was closer to graffiti, more contemporary for me. When I was an adolescent, I painted a lot in the street. Basquiat helped me learn that this artistic language could exist, and even started to enter the art market. So I said: okay, I will work in this style, I can do that.
Years later, I started working with schools in Latin America, using art as a pedagogic tool. Latin America is very hard: inequality, violence, lack of food, a lot of problems in public space… but art can give a new air.
When I work with schools, I choose early years because children are very synthetic: they show reality. If you look at children’s drawings, they talk about their context: violence, relationships between women and men, where is the father, how the family is represented. A mother with four children. Every element reveals something. So, the link with the political and social context is present in these drawings. They helped me understand what’s actually happening in the periphery of these cities. I go to teach, but I actually learn a lot.
That’s important because if you want to talk about political and social context, you can’t only look at Instagram or Twitter. You have to go where the problems are. A school here is like the heart of a neighborhood. For example, students eat at school, so you can understand a neighborhood by talking with the kitchen staff: how is lunch on Monday? If Monday’s portion is double the size, it’s because children don’t eat during the weekend. So Monday, they make double. It’s all related. It seems like not, but it is.
I think that art has to surprise, there has to be some emotion... I work in street art because of this feeling of surprise. Because in the routine of going to work, and going home, when street art appears, I think that it helps you to break out from this mechanical way of life. You’re always taking the same road, and there appears a mural, an intervention… The city changes. It’s nice.
And in a more critical sense, I think what’s key is if an artwork makes you think, or gives you a new point of view. I’m always thinking about what art has to do in this crazy world… It’s not just decorative or about making money. That’s not for me. I want to make people think or give them a new point of view, like has happened to me. I want to make the same for the others, and I have this tool—I am an artist. So yeah: surprise, emotion, and a new point of view.