I have a growing obsession with physical media. I splurge on single-issue comics, I buy zines wherever I can find them, and I create merchandise for The Navigator.

I pop my wallet onto the counter at The Vault, fishing out a five-dollar bill and some coins to pay for my coffee. To the left, a print catches my eye. It's yellow-green with blue half-circles all over. Textured with miniscule dots, the bottom half is open water, while the top is layered with mountains. The wooden stand it’s stacked on reads ‘UFF Screen Printing Studio.’

I find a table, already typing the name into the search bar on my phone. I'm pleasantly surprised to find that the brand is local to Nanaimo. Even better, the ceiling above me doubles as UFF's floor.

If you've driven past Bowen, stopped by Drip Coffee Social, or attended Wolf Parade's 2025 Canada Tour, you're seen the work of UFF Screen Printing Studio. Utility boxes downtown are wrapped in his colourful designs, Drip’s minimalistic t-shirts are printed by his hand, and he’s worked with a couple of local bands to make them posters and merchandise. Becoming familiar with UFF's designs was like playing I Spy around town.

Here in Nanaimo, the arts community is strong and without a sense of competition. Mauro Dalla Costa, UFF's founder, has collaborated with multiple local artists and companies—Regard Coffee Roasters, Crit & Fumble, and Caveman & The Banshee. That trust is something he's immensely proud of. “The best thing that I have is that I'm in contact with amazing artists,” he says.

Dalla Costa operates out of the Bazaar, located directly above The Vault in Downtown Nanaimo. The studio is small, but well-kept. Clean, with vibrant prints lining the light-wood walls. It feels like I’m walking into a gallery. The window overlooking Victoria Crescent gives the illusion of a wide open space.

He tugs out two stools for us to sit on.

First, I open up my laptop to show him the designs for The Navigator. I started with six. Some were just lettering, others were a lot more ambitious. I narrowed the options down to two—a newspaper graphic that I liked less the more I worked on it, and another based on a photograph I took in Departure Bay.

Thankfully, Dalla Costa seems more excited about the second.

His computer is much like my own, loaded up with designs and experiments that will never see the light of day—plus the odd few that do. He describes himself as his own worst client, creating and discovering without any true vision of where he will end up.

What colours? How many? Which brushes? In front of me, Dalla Costa's passion and creativity emanates off him in waves. “Sometimes, I feel that I wanna print big. And I say, well, how big can I print?”

When I ask him what makes a design difficult to screen print, I'm expecting him to say tiny, miniscule details or millions of colours on just one poster. More colours is at least more expensive, so I stuck to just one in the design that I made. But when Dalla Costa mentions the potential difficulties of those aspects in passing, he does so with a smile. Details are actually something of a specialty of his. No design is too scary, just interesting.

“We are printmakers. We are problem solvers!” he says. The larger size poses a challenge because of the control the artist must assert over large amounts of drying ink.

His artistic career did not begin with screen printing. Before Mauro Dalla Costa founded UFF, he was an 18-year-old in a metal band called MiserimoniuM, playing songs like “Intermortuus” or “Human Screams.”

Dalla Costa studied film at Instituto Superior de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales de Santa Fe for two years. Having spent his youth learning music, he went on to study composition at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. All successful bands have merchandise, and his would be no exception.

At that time, the online sphere of helpful tutorials was nonexistent. Although Dalla Costa had a few friends that got him started, he primarily learned on his own.

“I don't wanna see those designs,” Dalla Costa laughs good-naturedly. “They're so old!”

Regardless of his own opinion of his early work, those designs caught the attention of another local band, and just like that, he had a job—a time-consuming one. Dalla Costa wound up printing shirts for plenty more bands, listening to their music for inspiration.

So, he left university to create something else. Leaving UNL or MiserimoniuM didn’t mean leaving music behind as a whole.

“[Music] is my deepest connection in this life, and it always will be,” he says. But, “I decided, okay. [Printmaking] is going to be what I’m going to do.”

If you’re wondering what the “UFF” in UFF Screen Printing Studio stands for, you’re not alone. Before I can get around to asking, Dalla Costa prefaces our interview by telling me it stands for nothing. It’s the sound you make once you’ve done good work. Uff, that was good. Or, if it’s not your best work: uff, maybe next time.

Back in Argentina, UFF was known as UFF Serígrafia.

In 2004, Dalla Costa served as one of 36 vendors at the very first La Diseña Santa Fe. Nowadays, the market has hundreds of vendors per year.

“I won one of the contests for screen printing,” he says. The achievement pushed him to realize that screen printing didn't have to just be a job, or something to make a living off of. It didn’t just have to be making shirts for other people. He could make art with it too.

“I fell in love with paper. The second market was shirts and paper, and the third market was…” Dalla Costa pauses for dramatic effect, then makes an exploding motion with his hands, breaking out into a grin. “Posters!”

The only artworks that I have ever sold have been paintings or drawings that I had no personal attachment to. These days, all of the art I make is for me—shuttered away in my notebook or hidden in the back of my closet. I’m too wrapped up in my own expectations of how I want it to look and how I want other people to feel about it.

Dalla Costa shows no signs of sharing the attachment issues that I have with my artwork. To him, making a sale is a show of trust. To have one of his posters displayed on someone else’s wall is an honour.

“It’s gonna have another meaning,” he says with pride, excited about the very thing that I shy away from.

He's come a long way since commissioning his own shirts from himself. For the past two years, he acted as a member of the Urban Design Roster for the City of Nanaimo. A rotating collection of 22 artists are contacted by departments of the city like Culture or Traffic/Transportation or Engineering. It’s how he ended up having his original designs on three utility boxes on Bowen and Northfield.

Prior to that, he worked with the Ministry of Culture in Santa Fe. He taught screen printing to both the general public and staff in several different cultural spaces.

“Screen printing allows me to travel in two worlds,” he says. There's the commercial side, where he prints for other artists and brands to generate income. Then, there is Dalla Costa's original artwork in museums, galleries, or exhibitions. It's all the same medium. “One day, I'm doing art. Another day, I'm doing a job.”

Artists, like myself, often have difficulty balancing what we do for our own enjoyment and what will actually find success. The two are rarely one and the same. Dalla Costa is lucky.

“Screen printing has been here for a thousand years … the technique is kind of the same,” Dalla Costa explains. Prep screen. Load emulsion. Expose positive. Clean screen. Ink. Squeegee. It's the technology that changes. With time, computers have eased the time spent creating designs and separating layers. With growing environmental concerns, inks with heavy solvents and chemicals have degraded in popularity.

When Dalla Costa moved to Canada eight years ago, chemicals and emulsions became new again—an unfamiliarity he had to study. But that readjustment wasn’t wholly a disadvantage, it also opened doors.

“I love to explore. Printing on wood? I love it,” he says. “Here in Canada, I found that wood is very accessible … in Argentina, it is not cheap.”

We take a second to bond over using wood as your base. Even if I’m using acrylic as I would on a canvas, its smooth surface and grooves make it a unique experience.

Last year for Luminous Paths, he designed an installation unlike anything associated with UFF. The Portal was made of glass and lights, offering an immersive experience to visitors in Maffeo Sutton Park. The City of Nanaimo describes it as “infinity mirrors along its sides evoke a sense of endless repetition, prompting contemplation on themes of continuity and infinite possibilities.”

Change is not some foreign entity to Dalla Costa, and the unknown is not an unreachable mass. In terms of other newborn printmakers, he recommends starting with newspapers. Start cheap, pay less for your mistakes.

When Dalla Costa started in Argentina, materials were much harder to come by. So, he built his equipment himself. He pats the wooden vacuum table sitting behind him. They could cost a few thousand dollars but he built his own for a couple hundred.

“I've been in a little room in the backyard of my parent's house. I've been in a huge company with automatics,” he tells me. Professional equipment will make you a better product, but that's not necessarily what a beginner needs to prioritize. “Focus more on getting the right inks and the right emulsion. That’s the key for starting.”

It's a repetitive process. He urges beginners to take advantage of that. “Print, print, print, and you are gonna get there.”

Even when he's printing copies, Dalla Costa still views each one as unique.

The ink passing through the screen only exists for that moment.

“Screen printing [is] like parallel universes.” He points to his drying rack, where metal lays on top of metal, a resting place for prints in process. “We are all kind of the same. Each other, but different.”

When I ask Dalla Costa what his favourite achievement is, he refers back to that prize that started it all. But he takes another second to think about it. “Well, this place for me.”

Both of us automatically scan the space around us—the prints set up behind me, the workspace spread along the wall that backs him, the shirts hung up beside the window, and the table between us that hides the stools we're perched on.

“I know it looks small, but as I said, I've been in huge companies,” he says. “For me, small is nice … this is my own space now, and—for me, my biggest achievement is my freedom.”

When I think about freedom, I think about independence. For Dalla Costa, it’s also the freedom to work with other creatives, the freedom to produce his own work, as well as the freedom to continue his artistic experimentation.

Business is usually the enemy of passion. Turning a hobby into a job is colloquially known as the best way to burn yourself out. Dalla Costa does not share this experience. “Instead of making my personal work less appealing, it actually makes every moment I get to work on my own art feel very special … like a small gift to my soul, reminding me that I can still create things I love and keep challenging myself.”

Once I’ve run out of questions, he starts asking about what I do, and some lingering questions about the shirt designs for The Navigator. We talk about adding text and clouds; I can already see the wheels turning in his creative brain about how to make that work. But then, he turns to me. He asks if I made the design.

Yes, I did.

Dalla Costa smiles. I could add the clouds then, if I wanted.

I laugh. Spoiler alert, I left the clouds to the professional. He grabs one of his prints off the display by the door and tucks a shiny black business card into the plastic covering. A souvenir for me to take home—a physical representation of that moment.

I put it on my wall.