As an ´acePIRAR artist-in-residency, Cristiano Sant’Anna (Brazil) developed Fireflies/Vagalumes, an intervention project with the community of Fundación CPI (Center for Integrated Psychotherapy) located in the neighbourhood of Colegiales, just a block away from ´ace‘s studio in the City of Buenos Aires.

Sant’Anna worked with the concurrents of Fundación CPI for one week, giving a pinhole photography workshop with the aim to build a collective discourse. Through practice, the workshop participants will be invited to photograph their environment, their daily life and their environment, to “look” at each-other with cameras built with matchboxes. Through the photographic aesthetic perception, different issues will be discussed, such as belonging and citizenship. Firefly seeks to provide a space for reflection about how we define our own worlds raised from the belief that art is a medium open to the diversity of opinions, open to free and committed exchange of points of view and thoughts.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Cristiano Sant’Anna is a visual artist who works issues related to territory and the relationships established in the landscape. Territory thought of as a scope of negotiations and relations involving actors. You can only speak about territory when you speak about man. I start from the theoretical reference from the Geographer Eric Dardel, on Earth and Man. In addition to the visible, landscape is a series of relationships involving touch, smell, feelings and the route itself. A multiplicity of perceptions that go beyond the visual. To translate these visual sensations requires breaking the formal routine of photography. Sometimes Sant’Anna does this through the production of videos reflecting on perception of time, such as persistence of the look; others by inviting people to use the camera, as he did during the narrative photography workshop at the Hotel da Locura, among patients of this psychiatric institution.

Within this context, he has also produced the photobook Archipelago with the fishing communities nearby Porto Alegre, Brazil, also with the series Casi Paisajes, which explores relationships in the flood fields in the wild nature in southern Brazil, and Atalaya, a photobook about the ritual of hunting. With a look shaped by years of photojournalism, his search is focused on the exploration of the territory and the relations established in this field.