Bio

Ana Cichowicz is a Brazilian artist and social anthropologist based in Berlin. She has extensive fieldwork experience with Kalderash Romani people in Brazil and Argentina. Her PhD research explored cinema, foreignness, and world-making practices through the films of Algerian Romani filmmaker Tony Gatlif. After completing her PhD, Ana moved to Italy and later to Germany. It was during this migration process that her photographic practice intensified. In 2022, Ana began to take photography more seriously, driven by the desire not only to study images academically but also to explore the practice of art-making. Ana’s work emerges from dialogues between art, philosophy, and anthropology. Her research interests focus on the poetics of everyday (street) life, practices of environing, and foreignness and migration. Whether through photo performance, documentary photography, or street photography, her practice is marked by a constant reflection on the condition of the image itself—not just on the content captured, but on the form, the making, the process of creating a photograph, and what might emerge from this unfolding. In her artistic practice, Ana seeks to create images that challenge the notion of photography as a medium revealing truths and essences that preexist the image. For her, the world is not a passive entity waiting to be “captured”; it is continuously brought into being through encounters among various bodies, including the camera. In this sense, Ana aims to compose photographs that elicit an engagement beyond mere attestations such as "This is a person," "This is a landscape," or "This is a street." Instead, by provoking questions like "What is this?" or "How did this come to be?" her work ultimately conveys, "This came into being." Ana’s practice does not align with traditional dichotomies that oppose the real and the imaginary but instead explores the tensions between them, proposing photography as a “bringing forth machine”. In other words, an act capable of germinating one of the countless latent seeds of scenes, atmospheres, and worlds that, prior to the making of the photograph, existed only 'in potential.' It is not about portraying the real but about bringing things into being—a poetic and political gesture that opens fissures in the real, making way for life and new worlds to emerge.