SALLY SANTIAGO | Cohabitation Patterns

Human existence is – and always has been – confronted by dilemmas surrounding its real and material presence in the world, by conquering spaces and what they represent, by population developments and the pure habitation of individuals on earth. These dilemmas are not only found in a material perspective of the world, this existence is also – and always has been – confronted by questionings around soul and spirit, their origins and immaterial fields that have close relations with religions and mysticism, by the pure unknowability of the existence of what is not matter and the mystery offered to individuals «programmed» to a less intuitive immaterial understanding. Human existence functions around a thought that searches for self-knowledge, the functioning of its existence and its innumerable whys. Science, philosophies, and religions offer perspectives that contemplate different faces of this discussion, which revolves around the cohabitation of the real material space and the real immaterial space. Spaces that encompass an entire existence, which goes beyond anthropocentrism and places man in a perspective concomitant to this world, where once again the dimensions of these spaces are reconfigured.

When we are invited to observe from this perspective, a chimeric journey begins between material and immaterial fields, making it possible to enter a space of intersection, parallel presence, where their manifestations of real existence relate to and exert mutual influence. Unveiling spaces that somehow diverge by the presence or absence of matter, but that are coexistent and cohabitant.

Cohabitation Patterns is a visual journey to these material and immaterial fields in their perspectives of cohabitation through a series of analogue photographs captured in the south and north of Portugal – geographical extremities – and printed on acetate, layered by dismembered photography of hands and feet – extremities of the human body – in order to layered a material presence to the abstraction of sensations and senses dynamized during the period in which the body visited the photographed spaces.