Mice On Mars

Spanish Duo Twee Muizen Blends Fashion, Art and Design to Create Supersized Murals, Strange Masks and Friendly Taxidermy. Prepare to Dive Into a World of Pop Surrealism

Fine artist Denís Galocha and fashion designer Cristina Barrientos are the creative duo (and real-life couple) known as Twee Muizen. They hail from Spain, but they picked up their studio name – Dutch for ‘two mice’ – during a stint in Amsterdam. Now the mice are back on home turf, collaborating with clients worldwide from their combined studio/gallery space in Barcelona. The duo were a standout appearance at this year’s Pictoplasma festival in Berlin. We caught up with them afterwards to find out about their story, including why they wish they’d thought their studio name through a little more.

Tell us a bit about your history Cristina

Barrientos: We are both from the countryside of Galicia, in the north of Spain. While studying I used to work the weekends in a small bar. That was the first time we saw each other, and since 2008 we’ve been together.

Denís Galocha: Once we had finished our studies we moved to Amsterdam. It was nice, but we never got used to the hard winters! The last year we were living there, I suggested Cris should make some of the characters that I was drawing, using textiles. The result was Giterij (named after our street at that time). This art toy was the seed of the whole collaboration.

Your studio name means ‘two mice’ in Dutch. How did you choose it?

Barrientos: This is a bit corny, and if we had thought that some day we would be asked in an interview why Twee Muizen is our artistic name, I don’t know if we would have chosen it! But yes, we are two mice.

In the first years of our relationship we started to call each other ‘mouse’. Our friends started to refer to us as ‘the mice’. We lost our names and became ‘los ratones’.