A ilha de Sam Nunca

 ANDREA SANTOLAYA

Andrea Santolaya, a mist from the great beyond

«Mountains of fire, wind and solitude. That is how one of the first Portuguese travellers to land there described the Azores in the 16th century, » wrote the Italian Antonio Tabucchi, who, at the end of the 20th century, became first Portuguese and later Azorean. My perception is that the fire, wind and solitude remain unchanged on the islands and that things have not changed much. It is not a place where people are able to erase their traces. It feels as if there is a pact between the Azores and the immutable, and another with the concept of distance.

The Azores, in the middle of the ocean, far from everything. Far from Europe and America. Perhaps it is the distance that makes the Azores so fascinating. But this distance does not exist for the islanders, who leave it to visitors, which is not strange, because the Azoreans are above all close to themselves. But close to themselves in what way? Having not thought of them as close to traditions and history for years, I was surprised when I met Andrea Santolaya—Eugenia Niño’s photographer granddaughter from Madrid’s famous Galería SEN—and see her fascinating, somnambulant Azorean artwork. What’s in this group of unsettling, yet calm-water photographs? One exhibition, based on poems by Natália Correia, is entitled A Ilha de Sam Nunca (The Island of Sam Nunca) and talks about the idiosyncrasies of this place, so remote to those on the outside and so natural to those within, where communities unfold through a series of rites and rituals in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

How can I put it? Andrea Santolaya photographed the eternity of the mist. So I stopped believing that islanders only felt close to the physical ground, to their green and blue land, and that they were very close to their own, which was something immediate, devoid of a past. No. Santolaya disproves all this by creating an unforgettable somnambulant cartography, like Sonho em Forma de Carta (Dream in the Shape of a Letter), the first text of Tabucchi’s Mulher de Porto Pim. In it, as in Andrea Santolaya’s work, there is an existential geography hidden in the mist of a beyond. And there is also an interior map that projects emotion, travelling through a group of islands inhabited by people who venerate passions and worship gods such as love or hate («the god of hate is a small yellow dog with an emaciated appearance, and his temple rises on a tiny island shaped like a cone») or the god of resentment, but which, as in the interior map, are only real in a dream in the shape of a letter.

The remarkable Andrea Santolaya, the photograper granddaughter, seems to be telling us that, after ploughing through the waters for many days and nights, she has realised that the West has no end, that it continues to move with us, and that we can pursue it all we want without ever reaching it.

And that is all, seen from a distance.

Enrique Vila-Matas

Translated by Daniela Medeiros