3rd place
bronze star award
Betina Samaia
brazil 
title
Africa
They were the ones who sent reports to the kings. And this news to the governing authorities was taken as accurate, undisputed, scientific truths and printed in rare books.
So everything we knew and all our fantasy for a long time was mediated and led by these imperial glances.
I have travelled more than three times to Africa. But among all those wild images presented to me by books and films, between the intense reality of what was forming before my retina and what I had dreamed and imagined, new images were formed, intersections that did not correspond to any of previous model, unexplored spaces, other contact zones.
With the camera modified and the use of the infrared filter, I began to search this interior African landscape, inhabited by fantastic animals such as giraffe, zebra, lioness, cheetah, antelopes and even penguins.
In this savanna invented by me, I sought to give rise to a new time and place, of new shades, with unnamed seasons and at the same time autumnal and springtime; a time when Summer can coexist with Winter. An Africa of another nature.
With series named Choreography of Chaos, Nocturnals, Amazon-The Green’s End, , India- Memories of What I Have Never Seen, Africa, Through the Mirror, Forests from The Imaginary among others, she has participated in several solo and group exhibits in Brazil, France and the United States.
Over the past decade, her photo essays have been featured in the Carrousel du Louvre (Paris), Espace des Arts Sans Frontières (Paris), La Quatrième Image (Paris), Magic Brésil (Paris), Le Magazyn (California), Nacional Historical Museum (Rio de Janeiro), Paraty em Foco (Rio de Janeiro), Museum of Image and Sound (Sao Paulo), Art 57 Gallery (Sao Paulo) and Valu Oria Gallery (Sao Paulo).
Betina is author of the books Amazon -The Green’s End (Edition Bessard, 2021), Multiverso – Quarentena Books 2 (IpsisPub, 2021), Out into the Night (Madalena Publisher, 2017), and Blue (Madalena Publisher, 2015).
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entry description
From the second half of the eighteenth century, European naturalistic travelers, almost all men, began to form, in our western consciousness, images from distant places, such as Asia, America, Africa...They were the ones who sent reports to the kings. And this news to the governing authorities was taken as accurate, undisputed, scientific truths and printed in rare books.
So everything we knew and all our fantasy for a long time was mediated and led by these imperial glances.
I have travelled more than three times to Africa. But among all those wild images presented to me by books and films, between the intense reality of what was forming before my retina and what I had dreamed and imagined, new images were formed, intersections that did not correspond to any of previous model, unexplored spaces, other contact zones.
With the camera modified and the use of the infrared filter, I began to search this interior African landscape, inhabited by fantastic animals such as giraffe, zebra, lioness, cheetah, antelopes and even penguins.
In this savanna invented by me, I sought to give rise to a new time and place, of new shades, with unnamed seasons and at the same time autumnal and springtime; a time when Summer can coexist with Winter. An Africa of another nature.
about the photographer
Betina Samaia is a Brazilian photographer. Born in São Paulo (SP), in 1964, she holds a Bachelor's Degree in Psychology from PUC-SP (Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo) and seeks to register images from the unconscious by traveling, freely moving between past and present, reality and imagination.With series named Choreography of Chaos, Nocturnals, Amazon-The Green’s End, , India- Memories of What I Have Never Seen, Africa, Through the Mirror, Forests from The Imaginary among others, she has participated in several solo and group exhibits in Brazil, France and the United States.
Over the past decade, her photo essays have been featured in the Carrousel du Louvre (Paris), Espace des Arts Sans Frontières (Paris), La Quatrième Image (Paris), Magic Brésil (Paris), Le Magazyn (California), Nacional Historical Museum (Rio de Janeiro), Paraty em Foco (Rio de Janeiro), Museum of Image and Sound (Sao Paulo), Art 57 Gallery (Sao Paulo) and Valu Oria Gallery (Sao Paulo).
Betina is author of the books Amazon -The Green’s End (Edition Bessard, 2021), Multiverso – Quarentena Books 2 (IpsisPub, 2021), Out into the Night (Madalena Publisher, 2017), and Blue (Madalena Publisher, 2015).
back to gallery
