Susana Santana
Architect
The academic and formative trait crosses arts, architecture, and photography.
The photographic, illustrative, and digital exercises of the architect and visual artist express a whole graphism and intuitive geometry that admittedly are influences from everyday visual memory, architecture, graphic design, the ninth art – comic books – and various movements of postmodern art.
There is an incessant quest for the deconstruction of form, space, and reality; for the search of detail to intimacy, for telling a story that could have been or its alteration, in the eyes of those who see it. She is fascinated by the continuous and symbiotic movement of space and environment perception by the individual, which gives it significance and contextualization, mutates, and transforms the individual again, re-engaging the cycle. She feels, therefore exists.
Susana Santana created the ssantana atelier, an online platform and multidisciplinary studio, where Architecture services and the sale of author Photography and Illustration are differentiated or combined physically and conceptually.
Susana Santana’s POSTER
The poster is part of the author photo series This Is Personal, which explores the projection of intimacy onto others. Spans that convey particularities of life indoors, walls with paint marks and holes that have supported personal objects of other inhabitants, collections of used classics sold at street fairs, closed and barred windows that call for apartments. Sometimes intentionally public, sometimes unintentionally or unknowingly, those who pass by or come across the exposure of someone else’s life, end up creating a connection with a different reality, creating concepts and stories about the unknown other. Occasionally, a feeling of uneasiness for the other.
The mostly vertical railing of the span of a house in Lisbon becomes a denial, affirmed with the shutter closed and underlined by horizontal lines. It is a ‘no’. A request for silence. A separation. A goodbye. Which brings me back to Fernando Pessoa’s poem “Don’t say a Thing!”
