Swansea College of Art, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, UK
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Estéfani Bouza is a visual artist, researcher and lecturer at Swansea College of Art, University of Wales Trinity Saint David. Bouza’s practice and research focuses on ideas of archiving and collecting in photographic practice. She holds a PhD and an MA in photographic studies from the University of Westminster. Her work has been exhibited widely in the UK, Spain, Portugal and South America.
Research interests:
My research and practice consider archives, atlases and collections as systems to organise knowledge, and the way in which the organisation of those materials might provide us clues about the logics and interests behind those accumulations. This process is helpful to think about the potentialities of the archives and the absences in them. In that sense the archive can be understood as a space to re-think history. My interest in the archive can be traced back to my practice-based PhD that I completed in 2018 at the University of Westminster in London and with the title Taming Contingency: Photography at the Crossroads between Collections, Archives and Atlases. I am also a member of Art Channels Research Network. This network is coordinated by UFRGS (Universidade Federal do RioGrande do Sul in Brazil, and includes mostly well established artists and academics based around South America, such as Maria Ivone dos Santos, Hélio Fervenza, Mabe Bethônico. Within this network there is a special emphasis on the idea of performance around archival materials. This network has contributed to my understanding of the archive and reading it against a social and political context. I am also a member of SCAR which is a research network based at Swansea College of Art where I am in responsible for the guest lecture program amongst others. Last year I had the opportunity to exhibit my work Linha de Tensâo at Stiwdio Griffith at Swansea College of Art. In October I will be hosting a series of talks at Ffoto Cymru a Welsh photographic biennale and this years’ theme and artists investage and respond both public and private archives in Wales.
