Artist
Rita Puig-Serra Costa
Rita Puig-Serra Costa is a Barcelona-based photographer. With a background in Humanities and an MA in Comparative Literature, she later studied Graphic Design and Photography. Today, Costa works on personal projects alongside various commercial assignments. Her first project, Where Mimosa Bloom, was published by Editions du Lic in 2014. Her ongoing Anatomy of an Oyster project will launch in 2023. Closely related to literature, Costa’s work revolves around the concept of identity. Her investigations also explore the essence of human relationships, and the influence that love, death, luck or memories have on the construction of ourselves.
Anatomy of an Oyster
Mother-of-pearl, which will in time become the pearl, begins to form when a foreign element is introduced into the oyster. Anatomy of an Oyster is a journey into the past – a path backwards to revisit places from my childhood that help contextualise my present. It traces a story of violence, revision and integration from the abuses I suffered in my family as a child. It is, above all, an attempt to tell what needs to be told; a way of telling what could never be revealed to a now absent mother. At the same time, it’s a way of telling oneself. In this descent into the depths of remoteness, images and texts of the pearl-forming process accompany both new and archival photos, as well as short notes that capture my emotional, bodily and family memory. The pearl, which is an oyster’s autobiography, is the result of this search: a search carried out to find it, assimilate it, and finally remove it.
Similarly, the five contemporary photographers PHotoESPAÑA is nominating for FUTURES this year are developing work that stands out on today’s scene, offering five different yet complementary perspectives that provide an overview of contemporary practices, ranging from documentary (Umberto Diecinove) to a type of expanded photography that incorporates performance (Monica Egido), to work with the photobook format (Irene Zottola) and conceptual photography (Laura San Segundo and Rita Puig-Serra Costa). In 2022, PHotoESPAÑA closely tracked these artists’ progress.
In her project Ícaro, published as a photo book in 2022, Irene Zottola uses photography to offer a mystical fable as a metaphor of the contemporary world. In FOMO, also from 2022, Mónica Egido uses a performative duel to represent the need to stop and observe ourselves silently for an extended period of time. In The Circular Enclosure, a project currently underway and started in 2023, Laura San Segundo resolves a succession of landscapes as mental sites where the dialogue takes place between photography and the subconscious and is capable of transcending the inherent meaning of an image or element. In Anatomy of an Oyster, started in 2018 and still underway, Rita Puig-Serra Costa uses the photographic image to formulate a first-person journey into the past, in an attempt to tell a story of violence and abuse silenced by time. Finally, in the ongoing project INSCTS, Umberto Dicienove sets out to document the potential change we can achieve with insects, providing a global view with a special focus on people working on this change and those who will benefit from it.
Mónica Egido and Umberto Diecinove developed their projects as part of our MA in photography and artistic projects – the festival’s training programme. Laura San Segundo and Rita Puig-Serra Costa stood out within the set of projects submitted to the Discoveries viewing programme. And the Irene Zóttola’s photobook Ícaro was chosen for the 2022 PHotoESPAÑA award for Best Photography Book of the Year.