Metamorphoses: mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the creaturest of them all?

Photography workshop for kids and young adults by Sandra Rocha

Sandra Rocha chooses to approach the metamorphosis theme with the younger ones by making staged photographs, through which she proposes the use of mirrors as an object of transformation. Throughout the workshop, included in The Creature Day, the public programme for the exhibition Da calma fez-se o vento, the mirrors take on various functions: they hide, reveal, illuminate and create an unfolding that allows for all possible forms of experience, some of which evoke the games of (mistaken) appearance typical of the Baroque. But this is not only about mirrors. Participants learn to create a picture or a set of pictures with one or several models. Before capturing the picture, one has to frame it, light it, think about the depth of field and/or the speed one wants. It is also about questioning the supposed truthfulness of the photograph and playing with it. In the end, the characters in the photographs taken in this workshop will be nothing more than fictional beings, waiting for recitations that the spectators will certainly want to make up and attribute to them!

Sandra Rocha (Azores, 1974) is a graduate from UA – University of the Azores and attended the photography course at Ar.Co – Centro de Arte & Comunicação Visual, in Lisbon. In 2003, she co-founded Kameraphoto (2003-2012), the first photographer collective in Portugal. In 2008, she joined the “Artistic Creation and Creativity” programme of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and became part of the Azorean gallery Fonseca Macedo. In 2013, she moved to Paris, where she published Le silence des sirènes (Éditions Loco), her first monograph in France, with a text signed by Michel Poivert, in 2016. The following year, she took part in the Regards du Grand Paris (Commande Photographique Nationale), culminating in the publication of La vie immédiate (Éditions Loco), which was selected for the Prix du livre d’auteur, Rencontres d'Arles 2018. In 2020 presented Le moindre souffle at Centre Photographique Île-de-France. In 2022, she was elected to the new Pernod Ricard group's Artist Mentorship Programme, which culminated with the presentation of the project Le saut at the Rencontres d'Arles, in 2022.