Matías Costa (spain)

// 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.

His way of working is based on the idea of the search process itself as the natural engine of creation. Most of the time work begins the moment people start working and grows from that embryonic state to unpredictable places.

He begin to work on a previous theme of his personal universe, walking for hours in a provoked drift that reveals to him what he is looking for. He delves into the idea of cartography as a construction tool, based on experimentation, search and happy findings as part of the work.

// PROJECT

In Narva he is interested in learning more about the current difficulties as a result of the emotional conflict involved in the coexistence of Russian heritage with Estonian identity.

As it happens to him, because of his own uprooted and migrant biography, he is interested in places and people with a diffuse identity, with contradictions about their belonging, with difficulties and conflicts between their origin and their current situation. He is interested in stories of reconstruction and adaptation. He is interested in places and things in transformation, those that have suffered collective catastrophes. Those that try to find themselves and look for ways to relate to the environment and to others. He is interested in border places, but not only, or not necessarily with a physical border, but places that split, that are torn between two or more personalities or identities. He is interested in the contradictions of the loves and loyalties of people who have different loves and loyalties that sometimes cannot coexist.