Behind The Artworks: Urstaat - Autophagia (2025)

Tania Cearreta, aka Korapilo Collage, has been a fundamental part of Urstaat’s visual identity for years, shaping the aesthetic universe surrounding the band through single covers, posters, banners, t-shirts, and now the artwork for Autophagia. The collaboration emerged from a shared understanding of the music’s emotional core: a feeling of contained tension, constantly oscillating between restraint and eruption. In developing the visual concept, the band and Tania drew inspiration from Japanese imprint techniques such as gyotaku, fascinated by the unpredictable traces left by organic matter pressed onto paper. From there, she began experimenting with Chinese ink and water, allowing textures, fractures, and fluid forms to emerge naturally through the interaction of the materials themselves.

 

The resulting artwork mirrors the album’s atmosphere with unsettling precision. Layers of ink spread, crack, and retract like wounds, maps, or cellular structures caught in a process of transformation and self-consumption, reflecting the themes suggested by the title Autophagia. Through a meticulous process of paper experimentation, digitalization, collage, and Photoshop manipulation, the cover gradually assembled into a haunting fusion of tendrils, fractures, and dissolving matter. Together with the imagery created for the album’s three singles, the artwork explores ideas of atomization, fluidity, and inner collapse, visually echoing the music’s constant movement between density and release, containment and outburst.

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