©️ Andreia Santana. 2020. The Skull of the Haunted Snail. Courtesy of the artist and the gallery Filomena Soares.

The exhibition ‘The Skull of the Haunted Snail’ by Andreia Santana (Lisbon, 1991), curated by Bruno Leitão, is part of the regular program of the exhibition space Hangar – Centro de Investigação Artística, in Lisbon, and is the result of Andreia Santana’s artistic research on the “Soul Houses” of Ancient Egypt as a practice and materialization of an object that is simultaneously an ecosystem, and an interface.

Through an installation of glass sculptures conceived specifically for this exhibition, Santana intends to examine the condition of the artefact as a shelter, which enables the growth of other organisms (be they pests, bacteria or fungi), thereby modifying its museological status and decontextualizing it from its function as a historical artefact to host and sustain other types of existence and species in the future.
Santana, by proposing a counterpoint with the concept of Wittgenstein’s glass fly traps and Donna Harraway’s sympoiesis suggests the belief that artifacts, objects, places, living beings and entities – and, consequently, history itself – must be perceived as a potentially animated and living material that possesses a distinct spiritual essence (exactly as the Egyptians saw it), to the detriment of a stagnated gaze on obsolete knowledge and objects preserved in an interpretative vacuum.

In ‘The Skull of the Haunted Snail’, the visitor is invited to reflect on the artifacts as persistently contemporary forces that allow other intersectional forms of solidarity and contamination of time and space to appear, revealing new substances, matter, objects and bacteria as new possibilities of understanding history, culture and interspecies coexistence are spread.

Andreia Santana (1991, Lisbon) lives and works in Lisbon. Santana holds a BFA from ESAD – Caldas da Rainha and was a participant in the Independent Study Program of Maumaus School in Lisbon. Has participated in several residencies namely, Residency Unlimited in New York, with a fellowship from Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation; Panal 360 in Buenos Aires, Mieszkanie Gepperta, Poland and Gasworks – Triangle Network at Hangar, Lisbon. Santana won the NOVO BANCO Prize, was shortlisted for Ducato Prize (Italy), and has been awarded grants including Fulbright/Carmona e Costa Foundation, Criatório – CMP, Amadeo Souza Cardoso, and Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Her work has been shown in Portugal and internationally, highlighting the exhibitions: ‘Hollow Hands’ at Generali Milano; ‘The Outcast Manufacturers’ at Filomena Soares Gallery; 10000 years between Venus and Mars, Oporto Municipal Gallery; ‘Cultivated Memory’ Peninsula Gallery. New York; ‘Leaves of Absence’ at Serralves Contemporary Art Museum; ‘Vanishing Point’ Cordoaria Nacional; ‘Ghost of Chance’ La Nave, Madrid; ’10 Years, 10 artists, 10 commissions’, Chiado 8, Lisbon; ‘Now It Is Light’ Boavista Gallery, Lisbon; ‘The Lobster Loop’, MONITOR Gallery, Lisbon.