Roberto Santaguida
Biography
Roberto Santaguida lives and works in Montreal (Canada) and Hamburg (Germany). Since completing his studies in film production at Concordia University, his films and videos have been shown at more than 300 international festivals. He has also taken part in artist residencies in numerous countries such as Iran, Romania, Germany, Norway, or Australia. Roberto is the recipient of the K.M. Hunter Artist Award, the Chalmers Arts Fellowship and a fellowship from Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany. His artistic work is informed by the methods of coping, used in human and communities’ activities to ease pain and the disquiet of the mind. He bears witness to subterranean forces, and the attempts to ignore and to hide: concealment becomes a form of survival, and revelation, a path to deliverance.
About the artwork
In Peripheral Island, Roberto Santaguida gives prominence to the speech of others, thanks to a broken-up mode of presentation that can sometimes resemble a flashing light board. The voices are unaltered, but orchestrated and combined with musical scores of Bach, Beethoven and Vivaldi.
To create Peripheral Island, the artist gathered close friends, and recruited participants to provide a wide range of life experiences and points of view. In the 5 questions that he asked everybody, one had a greater impact than the others: “When did you realize you were going to die one day?”. By a marked physical presence, the piece attempts to create intimacy. Ideally, the viewer can feel in a state of physical and affective proximity to the work.
Artworks by the artist
