Fresh off star turns at IALD Enlighten Americas and Disruptia Madrid, artist and design extraordinnaire Tupac Martir has become a must-see presence in the lighting world. arc sits down with Martir to learn more about his interest in light, and his vastly diverse areas of expertise.

Every once in a while, you come across a designer that stops you in your tracks. Someone with a portfolio of work so awe-inspiring, eclectic and diverse, with the kind of character to match, that you just have to drop everything that you are doing and get to know them.

One such designer is Tupac Martir – founder and Creative Director of Satore Studio. After a standout presentation at IALD Enlighten Europe in 2024, followed by a keynote session at IALD Enlighten Americas in San Diego, and more recently taking part in the latest Disruptia event, led by Light Collective, in Madrid, Martir is a must-see on any talks programme, thanks to his unique approach to art, technology, and design.

Based in Lisbon, with a satellite office in the UK, Martir’s work with Satore Studio spans live performances, fashion shows, art installations, and architectural lighting, with his multidisciplinary studio always looking at new ways to combine design and technology to bring bold, beautiful concepts to life and deliver dazzling, memorable virtual experiences to audiences worldwide. Across the full scope of his work though, Martir has always sought to push the boundaries of what is possible.

In an exclusive interview with arc, he says: “I always have this joke – if it is a challenge, if it’s difficult and you say, ‘how are we going to pull this off?’, I’m your guy.

“There was a time where I was never the first designer to get called in. I was always the second designer, called in a moment of panic. I remember talking to my mum, and she asked me ‘how come every time I talk to you, you are doing a job that is last minute and panicked?’ I said, ‘because that is when they call me’. She said, ‘well, why don’t they call you from the beginning?’ I don’t know, mum.

“But I think I made a reputation of exactly that; if it’s weird, if it’s quirky, if it has a lot of challenges, then I get those jobs. But the challenge is the part that I enjoy.”

Challenging himself is something that has been true of Martir even dating back to his studies. A student at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, his initial interest was in Photography and Psychology, but true to his multi-disciplinary approach, this very quickly expanded.

“Photography was going to be my minor, and psychology my major; within a semester, I realised that I had it wrong, and I wanted to make photography my main thing,” he recalls.

“When I arrived at college in my first semester, one of the reasons why I went there was to study under Father Don Doll, who is a photographer for National Geographic. In my first semester, I couldn’t take his class, as I was just a freshman, but then he gave me a pass.

“That is when I realised that actually what I want to do is art. So, immediately, I had to go back and do the basic courses of art. And people usually take art courses as their electives, but because I was doing art, my electives became Calc Three, and Physics, while I was going through the basics of art – drawing, life drawing, painting, sculpture. Here, I ran into a beautiful man by the name of John Thein, who took me under his wing and became my mentor. Through him, I discovered painting, and suddenly the world just opens up. I would say that this is where the journey of my multidiscipline-ness comes from.

“Even though I went to a really small school that is not known for the arts, I was very privileged, because I had John, who saw me and thought, ‘I’m going to make an artist out of you’. Because of that passion that he had for me, it made all the other professors more aware of what I was trying to do.

“In my last year of school, my two main professors would come in and critique my work every two weeks, but they would always invite somebody else from the faculty in – sometimes it would be an art historian, or someone working in digital art. I went to a Jesuit school, and I had a brilliant professor who taught me God in Humans; as a Jesuit telling me ‘As a man of faith, I believe in this book, but as a man who understands the world is everything, I believe in science’, that element of it opened up really interesting conversations around the work that I was doing.

“And so, that has always cemented the foundations of what I do as an artist, and what we do as a studio. If we jump forward to where I am right now and all the work that I’m doing in so many different, varied elements, it’s because of that. It’s because I can see how the work that we’re doing, and the knowledge that we’re gathering in the studio, can be repurposed in so many different places, and how the knowledge that other people have can be brought back into some of the things that we’re doing.”

After graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting, Drawing, Etching, Photography and Digital Art (with a minor in Religion and Philosophy, no less), Martir “jumped around” a few different places, before starting work at the Opera House in Mexico City, initially assisting another artist who specialised in working with paper but, as has been the case throughout his career, this soon expanded to a lot more.

“I did what I still call the weirdest Master’s in Theatre Design for Opera, because I never took a class, but I used to assist everybody, from the costume department, the wigs department, the makeup artist, the lighting designer, the video designer, the sound designer; at one point I assisted a conductor, I assisted a singer, a dancer – I worked across the entire element of what they did.

“Alongside this, I started doing events and parties in Mexico City – every week, we were hosting different parties, so I’m learning more about lighting, about video, about how you make spaces, and how you think in a truly three-dimensional way, where also time and space are really important.”

Across his varied working career to this point, light had always been present, without necessarily taking centre stage. It wasn’t until he started working for MTV LATAM – eventually becoming Art Director at the tender age of 27 – that he started to really learn more and appreciate the power of light.

“At MTV LATAM, I was putting together something like 45 hours of content every single week, and having to learn how to use cameras, and how things were going to look on camera. One of the things that came from that was, at the time I was thinking more in terms of set design and prop design – I remembered making things that looked really cool, but when they were badly lit, they looked horrible. I remember seeing things done in which I didn’t do a great job, but the light was making it better. So, I said to myself, ‘I need to learn about light’. Because I was at MTV, I met a bunch of bands, and by meeting bands, I met their lighting designers, and their audio designers, and became embedded in that world.

“I said to a friend of mine one day that I really wanted to learn more about this, and he told me to go to the back of the stage, and speak to the guys working there, learn how to hang a lamp, how to put it together, learn the electronics of it all, do the training of a normal technician. He then said to me, ‘You think in three dimensionality in a way that none of us do. So, the moment that you understand how all that gets put together, your brain is going to be able to analyse how to programme and how to do all of these things’.”

With this additional knowledge now in place, Martir moved to the UK in 2009 to enrol at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama to study for his Master’s in theatre design. If things weren’t already going well for Martir, this is where his career truly took off, as his thesis project, Nierka, ended up being his first official show.

“The idea for Nierka was ‘I’m going to tell all of you where this is going. Screw just doing things in one way. We’re going to have opera singers, a children’s choir, an orchestra, two DJs, a five-piece rock band, and we’re going to have 15 dancers, and there’s going to be things moving, and there’s a combination of ballet and movement and painting and technology. And that almost sets up everything that I do. To the point that I always say the basis of what Satore Studio is, is based on the things that we did in Nierka.”

To that end, Martir explains that, since the official formation of Satore, he has always tried to foster a welcoming and collaborative spirit.

“I never meant to have a studio. But because I was starting to get booked so much, I wasn’t doing jobs anymore, I was designing them, and then sending freelancers to do it. So, my accountant said to me ‘you need to become incorporated, and you need to open a company’. It occurred very naturally, and it was very weird. God knows, HMRC hated my butt for two years, and they were correct to hate me, because I was out of my mind, I had no idea what I was doing.

“This is where Nierka and Satore are so tied together, because the ethos of the studio comes from a place of exploration; it’s a space in which all the arts are welcome, in which science and technology are welcome. It all comes from what I would call the humanity that exists in the studio.”

A prime example of this humanity is the presence of a fridge in each studio. But, unlike the fridge that might exist in any other office, this is not a place for staff to store their own lunch. Instead, it is always full of food that the team orders in, so that staff always have whatever they need.

“Your wage is your wage; you should not be using your wage to pay for your lunch while you are here. I take care of you, because I know that you are taking care of me,” Martir explains. “And so, this makes us have lunch together every day, and it generates a completely different type of camaraderie that wouldn’t exist otherwise, where you can sit down with colleagues who are working on different projects, and find out more about each other.

“I never say that we are a family, because families are dysfunctional as hell, let’s be honest. It’s more like-minded people coming together, like being in a social club.

“You are always going to have options of where you want to go and work, where you’re going to spend your time, the people that you’re going to spend your time with. You can sometimes hit the triple jackpot and get paid very well, do amazing work, and have a lot of fun doing it. The reality is sometimes you have to pick one or two of these, but I always thought that at least the place should be fun.”

This approach also extends to Martir’s “mission statement” for the studio as well. Elaborating, he adds: “It has to be a place of creativity, a place of openness. It has to be a place where technology is acknowledged as a collaborator. Nothing is permanent, and at the end of it all, it’s always about the humanity of things. There’s always been a joke that I put humanity into technology, because I see it as a collaborator, but for me, those are the most important elements. And I hope that if you were to speak with people that passed through the studio, they would tell you what a good place it was to work and how big of a school it became.

“I had an entire conversation at one point with the guys at Epic in the middle of the pandemic, when my team was being stolen left, right, and centre, and I was like, ‘Guys, this is not fun’. They said ‘Yeah, it’s not fun for you, but it’s great for us, you make really good people’. Although it stings, you also take it as a source of pride, knowing that you’re preparing people to do good things and to think in a completely different way to what they’re used to.”

As a practice, Satore Studio has built an impressive, diverse body of work, including fashion collaborations with the likes of Alexander McQueen, Vivien Westwood and Prada, live music performances – including Beyoncé’s headline performance at Glastonbury Festival – and one-off art installations. Across all of this work, light plays an integral role, not only in enhancing the visual aspect, but in stirring up emotional responses in the viewer.

Martir adds: “What I enjoy most about light is how ephemeral it is. As an artist, you always try to find that conversation in which I am going to propose something, and I need you as an audience member to allow me to tap into your bag of emotions, and your bag of memories, so that we end up complementing the piece, and I think light is one of the true mediums in which that happens.

“I can put a blue light at 35% on a tungsten source being shuttered in a certain way, and it’s going to create an emotion in you. I am making the emotion, but you create the emotion for yourself, and you draw it from your own experiences. So suddenly, everything is a collaboration between me and the audience.

“The reason why I love painting is because I make a single frame, and that’s it. The idea of lighting is almost like painting in motion, painting through time, which is beautiful. When you imagine some of those spaces in which the light comes in – the grandiosity of it or the hiddenness of it – it generates places where you want to go and see, and when it works with things like music, it can generate emotions in people that they had no clue about.”

Alongside his work in fashion, entertainment and the arts, Martir explains that Satore Studio does also work on more “traditional” architectural lighting projects. Although these still typically have a more artistic flair to them.

An example of this, Martir tells, was through a collaboration with Gucci. “We did a party for Gucci in a house near Piccadilly, and there was very little power. We weren’t able to bring a generator, and I needed to give a sense to each of the rooms, so I ended up changing all of the light sources throughout the house, buying 15W light bulbs, and then sitting downstairs with my paint and hand painting every single one of the lamps, so every room would have a different feel, based on me painting the lamps. It was very artisan.

“When I work in architectural lighting, I come in and I change things that are there – usually coming in at stage one so that my work gets embedded with the architecture from the beginning. It’s funny though, because basically, I’m allowed in at stage one, I lead stage one from my side, stage two is when everybody else gets introduced, and then halfway through stage three, I’m not even allowed in the door. My nature is to keep changing things – the more things evolve, the more I want to do, and one of the things that I learned in architectural lighting is that once you’ve done your work in stages one and two, when we get into stage three, unless something major happens regarding the design intent, you’re not touching the design anymore. Congratulations, you’ll see it in five years.”

However, while Martir says that his nature is to change things as projects evolve, when reflecting on his overall approach to projects, he says that the main thrust of his ideas comes very quickly.

“Most of the time, I’ll get a brief, and the first thing that I want to do is talk to somebody, before I even start imaging what I want to do; I’ll talk to the director or the fashion designer or the production company. I need to have that crowning element right away, so that I understand my boundaries, and understand what elements I have in my toolbox, and what the things are that I need to worry about, my restrictions – usually these are things like power, budget, height – and then from there I start working around it.

“The reality of it is I’ll probably have 90% of my design done in the first five minutes. The main element is done really quickly, because I can understand what I need, and then I’ll go into the boutique elements and refine everything according to what we’re trying to do, especially with light.”

This immediacy is something that Martir puts down to his varied background, and in particular his ‘Jack of all Trades’ time at the Opera House in Mexico City. “All the work that I’ve done in 3D worlds, whether it was sculpture, set design, all these elements have given me the opportunity to understand. A lot of it comes from having done every single job at the Opera House to understand what elements will make something good.

“I don’t like to say I take risks – a risk is a father or a mother who has to run through a bomb or a warzone to try and get food for their children. Me making a decision of red or blue is not a risk, it’s an educated decision. But I feel very comfortable with the tools that I have at my disposal. I study a lot, I read a lot, my brain is stimulated on a regular basis about the possibilities of what can be done.”

Reflecting on such possibilities, Martir cites his collaborations with Alexander McQueen and Vivian Westwood as particular highlights – “these are icons that go beyond fashion, and have transformed the landscape of culture and arts”. His collaboration with McQueen was for Plato’s Atlantis, which would become the fashion designer’s final show.

Meanwhile, he talks of his work with Prada, Carsten Holler and Nick Reynolds as standouts for the way in which they worked together. “We were trying to transcend how architecture can be achieved, and how it can be seen.”

A particular standout though, is Háita – a project that served as a foundation for Martir’s presence in Lisbon. As a project, Háita was born from the exercise of imagining how a dancer’s choreography could be explored inside out. Combining dance with music and state-of-the-art technology, the installation took the form of a quadripathic exhibition of four projections of the same choreographed piece. The dance was a mixture of styles, incorporating ballet, Portuguese vira and Mexican traditions – captured on film, but also through volumetric and motion capture technology. The installation was activated by a dancer, illuminated through a projection based on an electroencephalogram made of her brain, and representing the patterns of her brainwaves throughout the choreography, building an inverted image of how a dancer imagines her own choreography.

“As a project, this transcends the simple, and looks to find a meaning that goes beyond entertaining somebody,” Matir says.

As for dream collaborators going forward, Martir says that, aside from lighting La Sagrada Familia, or working with Pearl Jam, he doesn’t have many dream clients, but rather, he is more interested in continuing to push the boundaries of what is possible.

“There are people that I would love to work with, but at the same time, I think that the part that I am more interested in is the challenge, and how we make something new. How do we reinvent something? How do we turn around the scales of things and make people have a new vision of what can be possible?”

Central to this mindset, Martir is always trying to keep abreast of the latest developments in technology. Having been in the know about AI and VR since the mid 2010s (“I’m part of the OGs of the second wave of VR”), he is always looking at courses and forums to keep up to date with new developments. However, he is keen to ensure that the work itself takes centre stage, not the technology used.

“I don’t care about what the technology can do, more about whether I can bend the technology to do what I want it to do. That for me is always more interesting,” he says. “How can I create new forms of entertainment, new forms of storytelling? Technology is a character; the way that the graphics card that you use and the software that you have is like building a character in the same way that an actor needs to realise what their backstory is and how they behave and move, it’s the same thing. It’s just that technology should never be the main actor of your story – it should be a supporting actor who gets a scene.”

Similar to the way he keeps an eye on future developments in technology, Martir and Satore Studio are also firmly keeping their fingers on the pulse of emerging talent in the design world too. Keen to nurture and mentor the next generation, Martir has established the Satore Academy – an initiative based on his desire to give something back.

“Not everybody can come in and be an intern, and sometimes people just need somebody to talk to that has a bit of knowledge,” he said. “We end up taking between six and eight people on every time we do it. We’ve had people that are starting their Master’s, have just graduated, are in the middle of school, and we help them out in any possible way, giving them direction or even sometimes just having a bit of a therapy session. We want to act as a sounding board for people who are looking for something a bit different, or are a little bit lost and want to change career or pivot, and give an opportunity to people in a different way. It is something that we feel very, very proud of.”

Finally, as a man who is always looking to the future, what are some of his bold predictions for the design world in the coming years?

“The more things that we’re doing in real time, that we’re doing with parametric design, some of the things that are happening with technology, at some point reality is going to hit, and all of the AI-generated visuals that people are making are not going to be the right thing,” he said. “But I think that there’s a lot of things that the industry can do better in terms of making us understand the true possibilities of the products, and also the way that we are understanding what humans can see and how we’re seeing the world. We’re going to start finding new, subtle ways to do it.

“I think we’re just scratching the surface of what we’re going to be. With things like mixed reality, once we get this working properly, welcome to the fourth dimension. Suddenly there’s going to be an entire new world to explore, and I think that is going to be a very interesting space.”

So, as we venture forth into this brave new world, I can think of few designers more suited to lead us into the future than Tupac Martir.

www.satorestudio.com