Caterina E. Shanta (Landsthul, Germany, 1986) is an artist and director based in Pordenone. After earning an MFA from IUAV University in Venice, she started working in the field of moving images.
Her artistic research investigates the images produced by other people, with a methodology partly drawn from visual anthropology, in order to understand how these images are connected to certain traumatic contexts. Her artistic interest focuses on the redefinition of the images that are typical of the documentary technique.
Shanta creates films based on private archives through the practice of collective cinema and thanks to visual materials such as photographs and videos that she later mixes and edits appropriately.
Shanta took part in numerous artistic residencies such as Atelier Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa (Venice), Careof Art Residency (Milan), as well as in programmes for artists such as VISIO – European Programme on Artists’ Moving Images at Lo Schermo dell’arte Film Festival (Florence), ARTISSIMA and TORINO Social Impact Film Award, Q-Rated, Israel Film Commitment, Filmmaker, and Anthropology.
WORK ON DISPLAY
Abbiamo visto le stesse stelle, 2021 (*)
video, 16′ 05”
Abbiamo visto le stesse stelle (2021) is a collective and participatory video at the threshold between documentary and fiction. The work develops along a plurality of micro-narratives, a multifaceted and fragmented tale which evokes the real or phantasmatic meeting with an ill-defined alien entity who has appeared, influencing everyone’s lives and generating contrasting emotions. The presence of such a disturbing subject, neither living nor dead, is evoked by means of fictional stories, created by framing a series of objects, images, and family “findings” that are the alien’s legacy, the testimony of the meeting with it. The work, whose Italian title translates as “we’ve seen the same stars”, is the occasion to speak about processes of humanisation and dehumanisation of others.
* The video results from a participatory workshop in collective cinema held by the artist, Caterina Erica Shanta, with a group of secondary school students at the third, fourth and fifth years at the Liceo Artistico “E. Galvani di Cordenons (PN)”. The aims of the workshop were to get the students familiar with practices of participatory art and to introduce them to a professional artist; to acquire professional competencies linked with collective cinema, including the writing of a screenplay and the shooting and editing of the video; and to encourage the non-conventional use of a tool such as the smartphone in order to reveal its untapped creative properties. The workshop is curated by Rachele D’Osualdo (Cultural Association ETRARTE).
