Uiler Costa-Santos 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), Babel (BR/ USA) and São Mamede (PT).
Education
2013
– Bachelor degree in Graphic Design by Jorge Amado University – Jorge Amado University, Salvador, Brazil
2010
– Technologist in Multimedia Production by Unijorge – Jorge Amado University, Salvador, Brazil
Solo Exhibitions
2017
– Salvador Seen from Up Above, Salvador, Brazil
Group Exhibitions
2022
– SP-Arte, Galeria Babel, São Paulo, Brazil
– V Festival Fotografia em Tempo e Afeto, Porto Velho, Brazil
2021
– SP-Arte, Galeria Babel, São Paulo, Brazil
– F23 Encontros fotográficos, São Paulo, Brazil
– SP-Arte Viewing room, São Paulo, Brazil
2020
– SP-foto Viewing room, São Paulo, Brazil
– Water, Espaço judith Munki, Petrópolis, Brazil
2019
– 16th National Photography Salon Pérsio Galembeck, Araras, Brazil
2017
– SSA Mapping Centro Pulsa, Salvador, Brazil
2014
– Crated, Canvaspop, New York, USA
Awards
2022
– Pierre Verger National Photography Award 2021/2022, 8th Edition
2020
– Teaching of art through the photographic act, Arts Award Jorge Portugal. Salvador, Brazil
Biennale
2022
– 13th Rencontres de Bamako – Biennale Africaine de la Photographie
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 shapes 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.
