Maria Oliveira is participating in the exhibition “NATURE FUTURE – young European photography”, with the project ‘To Wander the Sea’.
Maria grew up in Ponte de Lima, inspired and surrounded by nature. She currently lives in Porto. Her photography is inspired by her personal experiences. She has been interested in work about these physical and mental umbilical places. Between reality, memory and imagination.She is interested not in its documentation but in a poetic approach, working between the visible and the occult. Between reality, memory, and imagination.
She builds visual connections, to create approximations of what she feels in a certain place. To shuffle the past and the present.
“To Wander the Sea” is a work developed in the salt fields of Figueira da Foz, Portugal, within the scope of the Project ‘Sustain’ of Porto Photography Biennial 2021. She wanted to examine this unreal realm, which explored the relationship between the human and the universal. The ancestral existence salt, the enormous importance it once had, the incredible beauty of the place, the physical effort, the fragility of it, the intimate connection with the weather conditions, the water level, the wind, and the moon.
For Maria is important the connection between humans and salt, she exalts it and brings it to our attention because of the historical importance of this activity and the current intention to preserve it. The salt production will also be affected by climate change, namely, with the rise of seawater levels. The strong connection with the unpredictability of atmospheric conditions also interests her, this abandonment of nature that we cannot control despite all our efforts.
She is currently working on a new project until the end of the year and will keep working on the ‘To Wander the Sea’ project.
The exhibition is part of the French Presidency of the Council of the European Union, the Embassy of France in the Czech Republic, and the French Institute in Prague, in partnership with 11 European cultural centres, presenting “NATURE FUTURE – young European photography”, curated by the French Collective Fetart.
The exhibition features the work of 14 young European photographers, who analyze the environmental crisis from a fair, contemporary, poetic, and sometimes humorous perspective. It will be displayed until August 28, 2022, in the public space, at Kampa Park, Prague. You can read more about it here.
Maria is a Millenium Images contributor check more of her work here.
