Cintia Tortosa Santisteban - Screenshots from a series of videos about a rice field and its surroundings

Cintia Tortosa Santisteban
Screenshots from a series of videos about a rice field and its surroundings

Published by Chose Commune, April 2025
Size: 10.5 x 14.5 cm
160 pages
Hard cover, square spine, sewn, dry-stamped
Language: French / English / Japanese
ISBN: 979-10-96383-49-8

Through her extraordinary collection of still images from the videos she makes every day, Cintia Tortosa Santisteban explores the daily life of a rice field and the passersby she observes from her 5th-floor balcony.

Every day, Cintia Tortosa Santisteban films from the balcony of her small, fifth-floor Japanese apartment: it's like a ritual. Below, a rice field and the comings and goings of passersby, farmers, and children. On foot, by bike, by car. Cintia Tortosa Santisteban contemplates this daily life like a soap opera, made up of fleeting and always singular moments, which reveal the hidden details of days that follow one another without ever being the same.

Since 2021, Cintia Tortosa Santisteban has been collecting videos of this landscape she observes. From these videos, she has created freeze-frames that reveal the changing seasons, the transforming colors, the inhabitants who pass and repass along the rice field, and whom we think we recognize without really knowing their destiny.

Screenshots from a series of videos about a rice field and its surroundings , which is Cintia Tortosa Santisteban's first book, consists of around a hundred images taken from an archive of over a thousand videos. It is a small window into the theatre of everyday life.