Artist
Katya Bogachevskaia
Katya Bogachevskaia (*1986) is a visual artist, curator, editor, and lecturer from StPetersburg, Russia, now based in Lisbon, Portugal.
Having worked as a photo editor, curator, and lecturer for many years, Katya picked up acamera after moving from Russia to Portugal. Photography has become a tool forBogachevskaia to express her feelings about forced emigration and the war unleashed byher native country, Russia, in Ukraine. Through her work, she reflects on the intense impactof this devastating war, searches for her own identity, copes with the loss of her home,experiences fear for her children, and navigates the process of integrating into a newenvironment.
Observing her children and the world around her - primarily nature, Katya createsmetaphorical images infused with subtle, hidden meanings.
Katya is the founder of the Academy of Documentary and Art Photography Fotografika, ofthe independent photobook publishing house Fotografika Publishing, and editor ofPhotojournal of Republic Media.
It’s Darkest Before The Dawn
On 24 February 2022, my country, Russia, started a full-scale war in its neighboring country, Ukraine, while concurrently intensifying repression against its own citizens. Because of my public anti-war stance, I began to receive threats and was eventually denounced. Fearing the increasing possibility of imprisonment and the harrowing chance that my young children would be left without a mother, I decided to leave Russia. In the autumn of 2022, my husband and I, together with our young children aged 3 and 5, decided to relocate to Portugal in response to the escalating situation in Russia.
To cope with the complex feelings and strong emotions tearing me from the inside, I picked up my camera again after a very long break. Everywhere around me, I began to see images reflecting my emotional state. Worries about war, death, emigration, loss of home, the dimness of the future, feelings of helplessness and guilt, questions about my own identity, and the need to integrate into a new environment – all these began to turn into images. Photography became my therapy, an opportunity to express and release the deep emotional pain I was grappling with. Over time, it became clear that the leitmotif of my project is the same as the reason for leaving the country where I grew up and lived for 36 years of my life – fear for my children, the desire to protect them in their fragility, and innocence, to hide them from the horror of the world that has gone mad.
By combining black and white and color images, photography, and text, by creating sequences of photographs over time and inviting the viewer to delve into the details of the images in search of hidden meaning, I try to create a narrative in which my personal story and the issues that concern me could be a starting point for others to think about and become an occasion for open discussions on challenging and uncomfortable topics, inviting viewers to reflect and participate in conversation.
Teresa Freitas' work explores the potentiality of colour in photography influenced by painting and cinematic language. For FUTURES, she presents two long-term projects. The first, The Flower Chronicles: Rosa damascena, was developed in small communities around the world who work with traditions based on flower production. In this series, Freitas’ images depict the historical, cultural and socioeconomic dimensions of this activity, while the second project, Cinematica, is a work-in-progress that documents subjects around the world, focusing on the visual impact of colour in composition.
Rui Costa's work explores the poetic and subjective dimension of documentary photography. The project UMA AZEITONA BORDADA EM AZUL is an emotional manifestation about his grandmother, where signs of rupture and restlessness are the matrix of a dense photographic narrative. By interconnecting images from different sources – captured directly by the artist and taken from family albums – Costa creates multiple meanings.
Maria Beatriz de Vilhena's practice examines human nature through systems of belief and collective identity. Her portfolio includes three different bodies of work: Irene is an ongoing project that probes the emotional side of memory through personal photographs and family archives; OMNIS, generated as a collective collaboration, depicts a young religious community during World Youth Day in Lisbon; and Fractal represents the diverse practices of faith and worship present in religious communities in Lisbon.
Katya Bogachevskaia embraces photography as a therapeutic process, expressing her feelings about Russia's invasion of Ukraine while also questioning her own identity. Through the rituals of her daily life, Bogachevskaia documents her emotional state, probing themes of war, emigration, a loss of home, the uncertainty of the future, guilt and death.
João Ramilo's work metaphorically appraises different socio- and economic perspectives around his own village, Louriceira, in the Portugal interior. His ongoing project From rock to bone is an ontological reflection based on his concerns about the disappearance, resignation and preservation of place.