Uiler Costa-Santos

Uiler Costa-Santos (1983) lives and works in Salvador (BA). He is a visual artist and educator. Through photography and the study of images, his research proposes a dialogue between the imaginary of landscape and the politics of the redistribution of the sensible brought about by abstraction. His production takes the image as an aesthetic vehicle, using images as an instrument that offers the body different experiences of perception departing from common, everyday spaces, giving back to it political and geographical possibilities of imagination.

Since 2017 the artist has been devoted to the series “Sizígia”, research carried out through aerial photography in the Itaparica channel, in the coastal region of Bahia, where he follows different landforms and tidal movements, constructing new ways of apprehending the local landscape.

He has collaborated with outlets such as National Geographic Brasil and National Geographic Traveller UK, Four Seasons and the Salvador Tourism Board, among others. He is a guest columnist for Iphoto Channel and for the Portuguese blog Fotografia DG and, since 2015, has taught photography training 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 landscapes. The experience of standing before them makes me feel something that perhaps, even if I were there, I would not feel. This interest in observing everyday spaces through new perspectives comes from the potential the senses have to guide us in reading reality, allowing us to expand it even when we are faced with its most harrowing version. To paraphrase the geography of Milton Santos, “Everything that we see, everything our sight reaches, is the landscape (…) Made up not only of volumes, but also of colours, movements, smells, sounds (...)”. And being able to think of landscapes as a crossing is what allows us to recognise that everything is connected.

When I look back on my childhood in the neighbourhood of Águas Claras, one of the outlying areas of Salvador, I realise how deeply I am marked by the lack of contact with other forms of nature that were, until then, socially unavailable to me; I understand how the desire for new places of existence that the construction of landscapes affords me comes to work as a working tool, a refuge and a way of relating to my own territory.

Before experiencing the state of suspension obtained through aerial photography, I explored the landscape from the top of a few buildings. Silence, scale and perspective are compositional elements that allow me to reflect on how immersed we are in (pre)fabricated realities and on how this socio-historical engineering takes from us the possibility of understanding them in other ways. It is in the attempt to expand such realities that I come to understand the political and fictional thicknesses involved in the making of this work.

My relationship with the coast and with water also comes from childhood. The sea was always the most accessible option for our family and, although these memories are not so sharp, I appropriate the sensation and the movement of the tides, which, through their impermanence and force, bring me something very familiar. In this sense, producing images that put pressure on the differences and similarities between space and nature through the abstraction of the lived territory itself allows me to build visual enigmas that, photographically, open the real onto a new reality.

CV

EDUCATION

- Bachelor's degree in Graphic Design from Unijorge. (Universidade Jorge Amado, Salvador Bahia) 2013

- Technologist degree in Multimedia Production from Unijorge (Universidade Jorge Amado, Salvador Bahia) 2010

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

- Salvador vista de cima, Salvador, BA. 2017

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

- Sp-foto viewing room, São Paulo, SP. 2020

- Água, Espaço Judith Munki, Petrópolis, RJ. 11/2019-02/2020

- 16º Salão Nacional de Fotografias Pérsio Galembeck, Araras, SP. 2019

- SSA Mapping o Centro Pulsa, Salvador, BA. 2017

- Crated, Canvaspop, New York. 2014

AWARDS

- Prêmio Nacional de Fotografia Pierre Verger, 8th edition, 2021-2022

- Ensino da arte pelo ato fotográfico, Prêmio das Artes Jorge Portugal. SALVADOR, BA. 2020

BIENNALE

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