LaCultur4 interview

13/08/2025

La Cultur4 is a London-based creative platform founded by multidisciplinary artist Karla Quiñonez León, dedicated to amplifying Latinx voices, stories, and aesthetics within the UK and beyond. Born from the desire to reclaim space and visibility for the Latin American diaspora, La Cultur4 bridges art, fashion, identity, and activism to build meaningful conversations across communities.

 

Interview with Sarah Yemalla, CEO of Yemalla Studio by Karla Q. León:

 

1.⁠ ⁠Presentation

 

My name is Sarah Yemalla, I’m 24 years old, I’m Ecuadorian, borned in Ibarra and my father is French. 

I moved from Ecuador when I was very young to the Canary Islands. 

I’m a designer, I make textile art and I have my clothes brand and what I try is to create from Ecuadorian textiles and its culture. 

2.⁠ Could you tell us how did your creative journey began or how did you start to be an artist? 

I’ve always being a very creative child who liked to work with textiles. Also, my mum is a textile artist herself and she used to work with local indigenous collectives, so i grew up with those references.

But for me art was just a way to express myself, I never really thought of it as a profession and that might also being due to listening to my mum saying that art is not a real profession and that I won’t be able to make a living out of it. So for me it was discarded, and during my high school I was really focus on science, in my head I was going to be an engineer; but when I turned 18 years old, I said nono! I want to do fashion design! And my mum was like No way!!! 

But I’m very headstrong so I went for it and from that moment I started to create and to take it more seriously, also discovering my creative side more in depth and figuring out how to make money out of it. 

Below, a barbie dress made by me when I was 7 years old:

3. Could you tell us more about the creative medium you use to express yourself?

So, when I was 18 years old, I decided to focus on costume design. I got accepted and I studied it at the University of the Arts London. During my studies I was very interested in trying to understand my own feelings so I started making personifications of them, creating costumes that symbolised what I was feeling in that moment, being that my first expressive medium. The results were very abstract and eccentric pieces. 

Once I graduated, I have been more focused on helping my father with our family’s brand, Yemalla Studio, whose signature garment is the denim jacket with traditional Ecuadorian tapestries on its back, created by my father in 1989 and which after a long pause in production, I encouraged him to revive.

My challenge now is to blend both of my creative universes, the surreal and the casual one, always creating with Ecuadorian textiles. 

So yes, my creative medium has always been textiles. Every time I see a fabric, I just feel so inspired by its touch, and in the end, we are always surrounded by fabrics, so that’s what makes it so personal for me too. 

4. What advice would you give to young Ecuadorian creatives that would like to start in the textile world?

I would say… Well, right now Ecuador is in such a delicate and complicated situation, but if you are a creative person there, I would encourage you to research into what has our country to offer, because Ecuador is so rich culturally, and try to highlight and re-evaluate the craftmanship, challenging yourself to see how you could keep it alive or what you could do to contribute to giving more visibility and reach to what we already have and perhaps reinterpret it.

5. Do you feel that your work preserves, reinvents or fuses textile heritage?

I think that for me it is a key element, especially for my brand, because we work with artisans from the indigenous community in Otavalo, and yes, I think we value that, and I really feel very proud when I wear clothes that I make or clothes that we have designed, because I know that 

I am wearing a little piece of Ecuador with me. 

And sometimes, even people on the street see it and they come up and ask, where it's from, and I can tell them the story behind it. 

So, yes, I feel very proud to be able to reimagine this textile craftsmanship.

6. Could you please tell me how you found out about Lacultur4?

Well, when I first arrived in London about three weeks ago, I really felt the need to connect with other Latin Americans, so I started searching on Instagram and the Internet to see who was creating a community and so on, and I think I found Karla first because of the exhibition she did “Para Ecuador con Amor”, and from there I saw that she had this profile called Lacultur4 and that she was creating this space to give visibility to other Ecuadorian artists, and well, I contacted her, and here I am!