“The Island of Sam Never,” by Andrea Santolaya

Arriving on an island is entering an “exotic” place — one full of possibilities, enchantment, and the unexpected. To stay is to “dive” in with deeper awareness.

During her time in the Azores, Andrea Santolaya has revealed, with wonder and dedication, the deeper layers of this territory, approaching the island — the islands — with curiosity, respect, and tenderness.

“The Island of Sam Never,” by Andrea Santolaya, is an exhibition-installation featuring photographs taken between 2017 and 2024. It is a journey — a kind of pilgrimage — in which the artist weaves a visual narrative of the Azorean islands. The photographs carry strong dramatic and psychological weight, evoking the elemental force of nature, the fragmented landscape, beauty, rawness, and the complex web of human and communal interaction — rituals, beliefs, and the sacred.

These images reflect the photographer’s ethnographic sensitivity and relational depth — her careful handling of the camera and her intimate approach to place: the restlessness of the elements, the lives of the island’s inhabitants — people, animals, plants, rocks, and the sea. Her photography invites us into an immersive experience of emotion and wonder, within a world that is at once spellbinding and stark.

Andrea Santolaya’s “Fall” into this archipelago is telluric, magical, relational, timeless, aesthetic, and literary. In a place where the elements assert themselves with great intensity, beauty, and rawness — and where people’s experiences and expressions are deeply rooted in ancient and initiatory traditions, such as the Festivals of the Holy Spirit and the Lenten pilgrimages — she finds deep resonance. “But I found myself rudderless, against the prayerful moon’s will.”*

This exhibition is also a dreamlike “journey” — an immersion into a microcosm that traverses the island(s) across multiple dimensions, from collective memory to psychological time. It creates dialogues between the photographs, the museum spaces, the objects of the Carlos Machado Museum, and the poetry of António de Sousa, compiled by Natália Correia in The Island of Sam Never. Like Alice’s dizzying “fall” into Wonderland, unexpected spaces emerge and doors open — some large, others small — leading to secret, magical, and poetic places. The result is a layered experience, at times disconcerting or surreal. It is also a path of personal and collective identity — a tribute to those who, in the 15th century, were cast here to fend for themselves, with an immense ocean as their boundary, and a volatile atmosphere of storms, earthquakes, and volcanoes — yet also a land of great fertility, communion, and beauty.

Andrea Santolaya offers us, with tenderness, these many singularities of “the islands,” contributing to a broader sense of identity through a perspective that, though once external, has now become deeply connected — and invites us to discover their enduring enchantment.

Maria Emanuel Albergaria, April 2025