A conversation with Ferran Pla

Article in ICON, El País, April 2026.

 

In February 2026, Ferran Pla and I had a conversation for an article that appeared in the printed magazine ICON which comes with the newspaper El País, published this April. Since the article is brief and our conversation was more extensive, I am sharing this slightly longer version, as I believe some interesting things were left out.

I would like to thank Ferran for his support and interest in Catàleg de Fulles.

Arnau

 

 

Ferran: How did Catàleg de Fulles come about?

Arnau: I've been interested in tea for many years, and thanks in part to the fantastic local tea spots and context I've been able to discover the immensity of its world. In Asia, it has many faces: there's the elitist world of the Chinese bourgeoisie, but also the tea farms, or the small town communist teahouses. In Barcelona, we are fortunate to have several very remarkable teahouses and tea shops.

A few years ago, I stopped flying, as part of a more political stance. Now, when I travel somewhere to do a residency or something else, I use an Interrail ticket to travel two or three weeks through Europe only by land. This way of traveling gives me the opportunity to stop in cities like Paris, Copenhagen, or wherever it is is that I am passing through and get to know their teahouses, talk to their costumers... Thanks to this, I've met people who run spaces, or who hold tea sessions in their homes. It's a very rich culture that has inspired Catàleg de Fulles.

 

 

Ferran: How are you different from a gourmet tea shop?

Arnau: Catàleg de Fulles was conceived from the beginning as an artistic project. My desire is to free it from the classic teahouse or tea shop format, and to open up the tea practices to a more plastic as well as a more social dimension. My goal is to bring it closer to contexts which are unaware of its dimension. I'm also interested in something a bit more conceptual: how the millennia-old tea culture takes a single plant, Camellia sinensis, and processes it in so many ways that from one bud, an infinite number of possibilities emerge, not only in terms of flavour, but also aroma, health-benefits and an entire culture which grew from their exposure to it. This leads me to think that at a local level, there should be ways to process our own plants with that same logic.

For example, if we take a nettle, even if it doesn't have the same properties as the tea plant, I wonder what would happen if we processed it with the level of knowledge that characterizes the ancestral processing sophistication which exists in Asia? I am an ignorant, so I wonder if herbalism, foraging and the culture of local plants has invested time in trying as many different forms of processing as Chinese culture has. If so, we have probably lost that knowledge. I am curious about finding new ways to experiment with native plants and how we could process them. And I am especially interested in doing it collectively, in community.

 

 

 

Ferran: Could you explain the differences between the main types of tea for someone who knows nothing about it?

Arnau: It's simpler than it seems. The tea plant is always the same. What varies is how it grows and how it is processed. For example, an important factor is the soil where it grows, the altitude, or whether it's a bush or a tree.

Green tea generally refers to the youngest leaves, the freshest buds; they are picked green and are usually consumed within a short period, or they're processed in order to stop their oxidation process. It's a type of tea that has a cooling effect on our body.

Pu-erh, for example, is a fermented tea that is usually aged. In fact, the idea is for it to age: there are Pu-erhs from the 1950s and 1960s that people store and care for as if they were wines. As they age, the flavour changes. The effect of this type of tea, as with black teas, is to warm our metabolism. With the exception of some raw Pu-erhs which are young teas, those have a cooling effect on the body as well.

Oolong is a type of tea, traditionally from Fujian, China, although very widespread in Taiwan. The way it is processed is very complex, with many steps: drying, oxidizing, rolling, roasting... It encompasses a very wide spectrum; one could say almost everything that exists between a green tea and a black tea. It tends to be very aromatic. Processing it requires great mastery that is often passed down from generation to generation. It can be consumed young (greener) or aged, each variety having an effect on our metabolism due to its oxidation.

Then you have many other types of tea, which could be categorized in many ways, black tea (known in Asia as red or hong), white, yellow teas, etc.

Some of the teas from Vietnam or Thailand that I sell come from what we could call a tea forest: there are areas where all the trees are tea trees, and there are indigenous communities living there who harvest the leaves and process them with their own traditional techniques. For example, there's a type of tea which is placed inside a bamboo and roasted, some are left to ferment. It's a huge world.

All these categories that we know in the West – green, black, white, red – are largely a fabrication of the Western market to commercialise it to an audience that is often unfamiliar with the product. In their origin, each town have their own way of processing certain teas, and many of the names of the teas simply correspond to the name of the place of origin.

 

 

Ferran: What is most misunderstood about tea from a Western perspective?

Arnau: Market demands can greatly distort things. For example right now many people are drinking matcha as a substitute for coffee. I recently went to the doctor because I had some stomach problem and the first thing she asked me was: do you drink matcha in the morning? Due to the wider commercialisation of matcha many people have adopted it believing it is a healthy alternative to coffee, and I agree that it is delicious, but the truth is that it can be too intense for some stomachs, especially on an empty stomach, since we ingest the leaves directly when we drink it.

Some Japanese friends have told me that in Japan, matcha is generally not consumed daily; it is something ceremonial and only drank in special occasions. But of course, it has exploded globally thanks to chains like Starbucks. It's also interesting to note that Japan is a small island: both Japan and China consume most of what they produce. It's like olive oil here; they don't need to export it, which is why it's expensive for us. This matcha boom has forced China to come to the rescue, with all its industrial capacity.

By that, I don't mean that all tea from China comes from extensive cultivation;
in fact, as I understand it and contrary to popular belief: Chinese tea is usually more artisanal than Japanese tea. China is huge and it has an endless number of traditions and ways of processing tea.

 

 

Ferran: Are you interested in tea as a ritual or artistic experience? Is that something you want to convey to Catàleg de Fulles consumers?

Arnau: Not so much, actually. I've seen that some people, even friends of Asian descent, have integrated tea into their artistic or musical practice, and I find it interesting when they do it. But I have a conflict with that path: although I find the world of tea fascinating, I feel there's a risk of cultural appropriation that worries me.

I see a boom of communities from various non-Asian countries engaging in tea practices, which in my opinion have a proto-new age culture approach, but seem more focused on the consumption of luxury goods and social status. Very often, tea culture is represented in this way through social media, which I find problematic as it fosters some kind of elitism around tea rather than an approach from collective or community practices.

On the other hand, I also have to deal with the conflict that sometimes arises for me, since I am importing this product from so far away, which is not the most sustainable practice either. But capitalism puts us in a place where we must navigate our contradictions, and although it is important to find a balance, I believe that ethics should not be overlooked. My idea for Catàleg de Fulles is to take tea as a starting point and gradually integrate other elements.

 

 

Ferran: How do you plan to collaborate with the art world through the project?

Arnau: From the beginning, I've imagined the project as a space for visual artists or musicians to start collaborating. A few days ago I was talking with a veteran sculptor about the project, and he said: 'I'll make you a teapot.' Great. Some other artist friend told me she wants to make some cups. I like this organic and open way of working, and I'm interested in the flexibility and space for experimentation that the union of the artistic context with tea culture can potentially open up, which has so many dimensions – performative, material – so I find it a very  rich territory.

But my desire is that these types of collaborations don't lose that dimension of daily habit, keeping it an open space which has the potential of reaching a wider audience, and not closed off to any specific context.

 

 

Ferran: Is Catàleg de Fulles an artistic project or a business?

Arnau: It's an artistic project, and it also has a political and social dimension. Obviously, it has a commercial side otherwise it wouldn't be sustainable, but for me, that is not its central aspect. And it's important for it to be this way because I see it as something that can evolve and morph depending on many external factors.

I can't see myself simply exporting tea my whole life. I see it as a beginning, a starting point. The name Catàleg de Fulles is deliberately open: 'fulles' in Catalan means leaves, but also pages. My interests, obviously, go beyond tea and the idea is that from this starting point, other elements can be added.

 

 

Ferran: How has your artistic practice evolved in recent years and how does tea fit into all of this?

Arnau: Around 2015, I hit a very strong blockage due to the polycrisis humanity is experiencing, and since then I have been going through many years of blockage and trying to approach artistic practices from a place that makes sense to me. The ways I have found are: doing things I can enjoy through including others, looking within for my true motivations. Aesthetic exercises may interest me, but they are not central to my practice. Sharing motivates me.

Since 2012, I've been coordinating a self-publishing platform called Anòmia, with it I worked with many foreign artists. There came a point when producing one object after another stopped making sense. I was working on a project based on degrowth on the side at the time and I was granted a research scholarship to turn Anòmia around, and so I started working on giving it an ecosocial, more collective dimension. On the other hand, I am still interested in producing physical objects because I believe they give the work a space outside of digital platforms; in that way the idea becomes something that outlives the artist. But the problem of overproduction is real: we start by publishing 500 copies of something and if we don't follow the logic dictated by the market, we end up with shelves full of objects, not knowing what to do with them.

Currently the spirit of the project is more about creating working groups, mutual aid, and collective actions. When I'm invited to do something exhibition-related, often the first thought that crosses my mind is: how can I collectivize this?

With tea, I'm going in the same direction. It's a way of blending everything: practice, community, the spiritual dimension – which I keep more private – and the political. It's like finding a rhythm and a space which makes sense.

 

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Photos: Violeta Mayoral
Follow Ferran's work:

instagram.com/ferestec
radiorelativa.eu/resident/sirk