LAST NIGHT AT PLAYAS DE TIJUANA
As an attempt to develop a new way of representing the environment Ana Andrade has abstracted the smallest fragments of the landscape, which were later developed by a microscope, making visible the most invisible particles of Playas de Tijuana.
Ana uses photography and video as methods to document and materialize the world, which is experienced in two scales – individuals in a community and the environment; surroundings are captured at micro scale. In both cases she is interested in what she calls “vital displacement”, the physical experience of our being in the world. In her micro-scale work she explores the interior life of the body and vital elements in the environment, such as water and earth, as they shape physical life.
Ana Andrade studied Communication at the University of Tijuana. She works with photography and video, mostly about human culture. Previous video and photographic projects are about people deported from the US living in the Tijuana River Channel and the Chinese community of Tijuana. In recent years she has been developing a visual language using a microscope as an extension of her camera. With it she captures the environment through its fragments, and the experience of pregnancy and childbirth viewed through poetic micro-cinematography of substances like placenta and breast milk. Her practice includes text and experimental sound making.
Her work has been exhibited throughout Mexico, in San Diego, Los Angeles, Italy and Berlin. She has taught photography and video in projects and collaborations with the Mayan community in Yucatan, México, with the Tijuana city dump community, at high schools, and at the Museum of Photographic Arts (MOPA), San Diego. She is currently enroled on the MFA program in Visual Arts at the University of California in San Diego (UCSD), and has been part of the young creators program (2011-2012, 2016-2017) of the National Fund for the Culture and Arts (FONCA).