Mini Gabi World: Interview with Gabi Almeida
Medway artist Gabi Almeida tells the story of how her music career was cut short, only for a new world of creativity to flourish
Born in Sao Paulo in Brazil, Gabi Almeida moved to the UK to study when she was just 16 years old - but the influence of her home country’s street art scene had already set the wheels in motion of an unbelievably varied career.
Creator of the whimsical universe Mini Gabi World, where quirky characters come to life through animation, street art, comics, music, and paintings, Gabi’s journey began while sitting in traffic on the way to school.
“I come from a creative family, my mother was a professional artist, and my grandparents had auction houses selling old art and antiques,” says Gabi. “But also Sao Paulo has a big street art scene. I used to get the bus a lot, and when the bus was not moving because of the traffic, I used to just stay watching these beautiful pieces, stuck there for hours. Sao Paulo also has one of the biggest Japanese colonies outside of Japan. I also had the element of the manga and anime and all that culture, which were a really big influence.”
Gabi began to dabble in music, playing in punk bands shortly before moving to the UK, where she attended the Musicians Institute in London. But while a record deal didn’t immediately materialise, opportunities eventually did.
“I was busking in London and annoying commuters in the morning,” says Gabi. "Someone liked [my music] and invited me to join an agency for session musicians,' she reveals. "Overnight, I went from busking to playing in venues like the Royal Albert Hall and TV shows like Jools Holland and MTV Awards."
Providing backing vocals and guitars to pop acts such as The Lighthouse Family, 5ive, Tricky and Cathy Dennis, Gabi’s creative desires were sparked once again.
“This experience really inspired me to go solo, because I saw how these artists were not only creating the music, but their whole show, their whole visuals. And after a few years I decided to be brave, although everybody told me I was crazy to start from the beginning again. But I was stubborn, and I decided to go solo, and that's when I started really exploring my visual art as well.”
Gabi returned to Brazil to create her first album, working on all the creative aspects. She crafted her cover artwork, developed the direction her music videos would go in, then did a tour for her first album - complete with impressive live light shows. Returning to Europe, her track ‘Just A Little Bit Of’ went to number 11 in the club chart in 2012. Her success in the electronic music scene led Gabi to a stint in Germany - where an accident would change the whole direction of her career.
“I was working with a label in Berlin, getting ready to start everything and I had a head injury, which stopped my music career completely,” says Gabi. “ After I left the hospital, I had to stay at home to recover. It was during this time, I had the idea of creating my first character, Mini Gabi, just to go on tour on my behalf and do my videos.”
MINI GABI WORLD
During her recovery period, Gabi started a secondary artistic journey, creating a joyful blend of imagination and passion, drawing inspiration from graffiti, anime, comics, and burlesque.
“I was so inspired by just doing character art that I decided to continue,” she says. “I still wasn’t well enough to go on tour and undertake the type of work the music scene requires.. So I just stayed focused on paintings, and I became really involved with the painting and illustration side of art, and started to really dive into visual art, eventually hosting exhibitions to showcase my illustrations and paintings. From that, more characters started to arrive and give me new ideas for the whole world.”
Moving back to the UK, Gabi began taking her creations into the world of street art, with paste-ups and murals in Shoreditch. Eventually, I started missing the music and the movement and the sound,” says Gabi, “I’d done enough of the static art, which was a fantastic time to heal, all the peace and steadiness of it. But I wanted to do animated murals to see these characters moving.”
During lockdown, she moved Mini Gabi World into the multimedia space. She created a moving mural thanking the NHS, which was displayed on the side of the iconic Flannels building in Oxford Street. It was the beginning of a new chapter that would see the inclusion of live projections and immersive murals that included movement and sound.
Her vibrant creations have been featured in galleries, music venues, and on public walls around the world. She’s collaborated on exciting projects with TEDx Covent Garden and The Eric Festival London, created immersive experiences in her home town of Medway, for the likes of the Electric Festival, where her environmental-focused animated film was projection-mapped to captivate audiences.
Gabi works with commissioning clients, as well as incorporating stories inspired by her own experiences, creating new characters with every project.
“One of my motives is to use bad experiences and transform them, as well as you can, into something good,” says Gabi. “I'm not saying I'm grateful for the head injury, but it really brought me to this, and I don't know if I would have arrived here if it hadn’t happened, because maybe I would have just continued as Gabi Almeida. Now it's so much more fun for me to have Mini Gabi World and a bunch of characters, and I'm just really enjoying the experience…everything makes sense. It was a life journey.”
The Mini Gabi World characters have more recently starred in a new music video, which is set to Gabi’s first solo single ‘Paint My Colours’.
“It has all my art and my animation and everything on it,” says Gabi. “It pretty much describes my world, because I see every art form as almost like a colour. When I used to write music, I used to see every instrument in a different colour, and when I paint and design characters, I see rhythm in the visuals, so it was really nice to use that track and put everything into the video.”
