Sara Aliaga Ticona

Visual Arts

The resignification of our relationship with water is a concept that photographer Sara Aliaga has been working on for some time. Visiting various communities in Latin America, she has learnt about reciprocal and respectful ways of relating to water and observed people’s struggle to keep it safe. For many of these communities, water is a “living being” that has feelings and memories and connects us with everything that has lived and will live on earth. In the Andean cosmovision, water is not only a “living being”, but also a being that creates connections with other realms of this world. Thus, in her project «Living Water, Presence and Absence», Sara proposes to go deeper into this idea, as a visual artist as well as an Aymara woman, besides reflecting on how we affect the life of water and how understanding it as a “living being” could help us deal with it as more than an element of consumption. The aim is to conduct the residency in the valley of Verzasca, in Switzerland, home to the Verzasca Photo Festival and a place known for having one of the most crystalline rivers in the world.

Sara Aliaga Ticona [BO] is an Aymara social communicator, photojournalist and visual artist. As a photographer and visual storyteller, she conceives photography as a social instrument of identity reconquest. The fundamental axes of her visual research converge around gender and identity, human rights, the climate crisis and the impact it has on indigenous peoples. Her work is built around symbolic, conceptual and documentary narratives with which she seeks to generate reflective discourses for the creation of a conscious and ethical visual collective memory that dignifies themes that are transversal to her own reality as a woman and as a photographer.