Rita Isaac

​

I am a visual artist with a degree in Painting by the Faculty of Fine Arts in Lisbon, Portugal, currently living and working in London Even though my Degree was Painting centred I developed my practice around photography, video and installation. Currently my focus of interest lives around the anthropological definition of Non-places (Marc Auge) and in the dichotomies associated with this concept: the full or empty, the volume and vacuum, disruption VS continuity, the presence and absence of one in such places/non-places and how our action can’t work over the space but instead respond to it. I find these concepts highly pliable and applicable to other areas such as body and skin as space and threshold, and for years I’ve been working with the blurred lines between what’s intrinsically connected with someone’s presence/absence in space and questions it raises: how much do we imprint  onto the spaces inhabit, to a point of leaving behind a presence even after our departure? How does that footprint affect the place’s own identity? And how much of it is passed onto us? How does time and light shape a place identity? With this background, my main goal in this residency is to listen to the place and its identity, research and learn from its story but also, and mainly, see what it says to us now. How does it receive or repel one’s presence and how can that relation be discussed through photography. I want to understand how the action of time and memory (the space’s not mine) is something intrinsically connected to it and not just exercised by us over it: for us, and as individuals, there’s no identity without memory, but this place has its own identity connected to its story and this is something that, unlike memory, cannot be changed or altered. It is permanent and set, unquestionable. Or is it?

​

WEB: https://www.ritaisaac.com

INSTA: https://www.instagram.com/r_isaacmatos/