“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

Biographical Notes

Andrea Santolaya (Madrid, 1982) is a photographer with a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Throughout her career, she has developed a distinct visual language with a particular focus on portraying small communities where a sense of timelessness emerges as a common thread. Her photographic journey has taken her from the Mikhailovsky Ballet in St. Petersburg to the Warao people in the Orinoco Delta, the world of boxing in New York City, the Russian Old Believers in Alaska, and the rituals of small communities in the Azores. Her work spans diverse geographies, including Russia, Venezuela, the United States, and Portugal. Her first solo exhibition, Around, was presented at the Marlborough Gallery in Madrid as part of the PhotoEspaña 2011 festival. Over the years, she has developed photographic, exhibition, editorial, and educational projects across the territories she explores. Andrea first visited São Miguel in 2017, having been invited for an artist residency at Pico do Refúgio, in Rabo de Peixe. She currently lives and works there.

Maria Emanuel Albergaria was born in Ponta Delgada in 1962. She studied Visual Arts, Social Anthropology, and Educational Sciences. Her work spans the fields of arts, heritage, culture, and education.

Over the course of her career, she has taught at the primary level, coordinated art workshops at the Ponta Delgada Prison, and created the installation A House in the Forest. She led the Educational Service of the Carlos Machado Museum and the Intangible Cultural Heritage team and founded the Museu Móvel project. She also worked in the Educational Service of the National Museum of Natural History and Science.

Maria has developed projects related to intangible heritage and community art, such as Caminhos do Chá, Sete Cidades Para Além da Paisagem, and Para que o Céu não nos Caia em Cima da Cabeça. She served as a technical advisor to the National Education Council and contributed to publications by Araucária publishing house. In 2024, she co-curated the exhibition Laudalino da Ponte Pacheco, the Photographer Who Was There and created the video everything is in everything, part of Fuso Insular.

Since 2019, she has been part of the team of the National Arts Plan.

Júlia Garcia (b. 1979) holds a degree in Communication Design from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Lisbon (2005). In 2007, she co-founded the studio Alice’s House with visual artist André Laranjinha on the island of São Miguel, Azores. From 2011 to 2021, she was an apprentice to master printer Dinis Botelho at Tipografia Micaelense. In 2019, alongside Manuel Diogo, she served as artistic director of TIPO – A Meeting of Letterpress Printers in São Miguel, Azores. She is a co-founder of the cultural association Oficinas de São Miguel (2023).

Her design for the film poster Entre Ilhas by Amaya Sumpsy received the Sophia Award from the Portuguese Academy of Cinema and the Jean-Loup Passek Award for Best Film Poster at the Mdoc festival (2023).