Matías Costa (spain)
08.05 – 27.05.2023
// BIO
He was born in Buenos Aires, in a family coming from Eastern Europe, Italy and Spain and disrupted by more than a hundred years of migrations. He went into exile in Spain at the age of four. The themes to which he returns again and again are born of estrangement from territory, identity and memory. He believes that cultural belonging has a lot to do with what we lack, what we search for without ever finding. This vital search is similar to what happens with photography, where the most important thing is what is not seen, what remains hidden in an image.
All his work is a process of searching. A game of mirrors and windows, to use the well-known metaphor that supported the famous exhibition curated by John Szarkowski at the MOMA. In his case, he uses the windows as mirrors and the mirrors as windows. He looks outside to find himself, and He looks back at himself to understand others. The result is a documentary work that operates, and only reaches its maturity, in the realm of the lyrical, the evocative and the interpretative.
// PROJECT
In Narva he wants to continue the search for his roots, for his ancestors from Eastern Europe who traveled part of the continent during the migratory movements of the early twentieth century to end up jumping continent. He wants to make that trip back to explore in depth this border town, its community, its confrontation with an unstable reality and see what is left of me in that place and what is there of its inhabitants in his current reality.