Uiler Costa-Santos

Uiler Costa-Santos (1983) is a visual artist and educator in the city of Salvador / BA, where he lives and works. His research proposes, through photography and the study of images, an interlocution between the imaginary of the landscape and the policies of redistribution of the sensitive by the abstraction. His production uses the image as an aesthetic vehicle, providing the body with different experiences of perception from common and everyday spaces, giving back possibilities of political-geographic imagination. Since 2017, the artist has dedicated himself to the “Sizígia” series, a research carried out through aerial photography of the Itaparica channel, a region on the coast of Bahia, where he follows different reliefs and movements of the tide and builds new ways of apprehending the local landscape. He has collaborated with vehicles such as National Geographic Brasil and National Geographic Traveler UK, Four Seasons, Salvador's Tourism Board, among others. He is a guest columnist for the Iphoto Channel and the Portuguese blog Fotografia DG and, since 2015, he has been teaching photography courses with an emphasis on technique and poetic research. His artistic work is represented by Paulo Darzé Galeria (BR), São Mamede (PT), Babel (BR/ USA) and Art & Emotion (CH).

STATEMENT

I have always been enchanted by the landscapes. The experience before them makes me feel something that, perhaps, not even being there I would feel. This interest in observing everyday spaces through new perspectives originates from the potential that the senses have to guide us in reading reality, allowing us to expand it even when we face its most amazing version. To paraphrase the geography of Milton Santos: ‘All that we see, what our vision achieves, is the landscape (…) Not only shapen of volumes, but also of colors, movements, smells, sounds (...)”. And being able to think of landscapes as a crossing is what allows us to recognize that everything is connected.

When I resume my childhood in the neighborhood of Águas Claras, one of the peripheral regions of Salvador thus I realize how the lack of contact with other forms of nature that were hitherto socially unavailable crosses me. Then I understand how the desire for new places of existence than the construction of landscapes gives me the opportunity to work as a work tool, refuge and form of relationship with my own territory.

Firstly, while experiencing the state of suspension obtained by aerial photography, I had explored the landscape from the top of some buildings. Silence, scale and perspective are compositional elements that allow me to reflect on how immersed we are in prefabricated realities and how this socio-historical engineering removes from us the possibility of understanding them in other ways. It is in an attempt to expand these realities that I come to understand the political and fictional densities involved in the construction of this work.

My relationship with the coast and with water also comes from childhood. The sea has always been the most reachable option for our family and although these memories are not so clear, I apprehend the sensation and the movement of the tides, which due to their impermanence and strength bring me something very familiar. In this sense, producing images that tension the differences and similarities between space and nature through the abstraction of the territory itself, allows the construction of visual enigmas that, photographically, transform the tangible into a new reality.

CV

TRAINING

- Bachelor degree in Graphic Design by Jorge Amado University. (Jorge Amado University, Salvador Bahia) 2013

- Technologist in Multimedia Production by Unijorge (Jorge Amado University, Salvador Bahia) 2010

INDIVIDUAL ART EXHIBITIONS

- Salvador Seen from Up Above, Salvador, BA. 2017

COLLECTIVE EXHIBITIONS

- SP-Arte, Galeria Babel, São paulo, SP. 20-24/10/2021

- F23 Encontros fotograficos, São Paulo, SP. 21-07 a 19/09/2021

- SP-Arte Viewing room, São Paulo, SP. 09-13/06  2021

- SP-foto Viewing room, São Paulo, SP. 2020

- Water, Espaço judith Munki, Petropolis, RJ. 11 / 2019-02 / 2020

- 16th National Photography Salon Pérsio Galembeck, Araras, SP. 2019

- SSA Mapping Centro Pulsa, Salvador, BA. 2017

- Crated, Canvaspop, New York. 2014

AWARDS

- Pierre Verger National Photography Award 2021/2022, 8th Edition

- Teaching of art through the photographic act, Arts Award Jorge Portugal. Salvador, BA.2020

BIENNALE

- Rencontres de Bamako - Biennalle Africaine de la Photographie, 2022