“This project was strongly inspired by the Mayan notion of cyclical time.”
Sandra Rocha,Born in 1974 in the Azores, Sandra Rocha is a photographer, awarded author and professor of photography at the Institut Supérieur d’Arts Appliqués in Paris.
When it came to choosing the mentor for the Pernod Ricard Arts Mentorship, Sandra Rocha’s extensive career work and her valuable teaching experience made her the perfect choice for the programme. Rocha began her artistic journey studying visual arts in Lisbon, where she then worked as a photojournalist. Later, she returned to university to study art history and founded a collective for Portuguese photographers, beginning her transition from documentary to artistic photography.
Until she moved to Paris in 2013, Rocha, who was born in the Portuguese mid-Atlantic archipelago of the Azores, had spent her whole life within a few miles of the ocean. It’s no surprise then that water is one of the recurring themes of her work, which also focuses on travel, landscape, nature, rituals, mythologies.
It was partly a shared interest in these themes that led Rocha to select Perrine Géliot as her mentee. Much like the ocean, the young artist is always searching for what is below the surface of a photograph. Yet this wasn’t the only connection between the two. “With her ‘photographic objects’, Géliot develops an original and complementary approach to my own work,” explains Rocha. “I was looking for an artist who had come through the fine arts system, and who thought about photography in a three-dimensional way.”
In Géliot, she found both. Following a foundation degree at the Atelier de Sèvres, the young artist was accepted to the Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where she studied under photographer and visual artist Patrick Tosani and photographer Eric Poitevin. It was here that she started to think about photography as a potential basis for sculpture, developing her own unique practice. The pair’s exhibition showed the depth of the artistic rapport they found on their joint journey. Focussing on the overgrown Maya city of Palenque and its waterfalls, Rocha’s portrait stills which feature employees from Pernod Ricard affiliates in Mexico, present the aquatic element there as one of perpetual flux in an environment where one human society has already melted away, an angle Géliot develops with her approach to using photographic prints as the basis for sculpture.