Screenshots From A Series Of Videos About A Rice Field And Its Surroundings by Cintia Tortosa Santisteban at PhMuseum Lab

Started in 2021, Cintia Tortosa Santisteban's work archives daily life in Japan via videos and screenshots, inviting us to pause.

Overview

Screenshots from a series of videos about a rice field and its surroundings is a project born in May 2021, when Cintia Tortosa Santisteban moved to a small apartment in Kanagawa, Japan, to teach at an elementary school. From her fifth-floor balcony, the Spanish teacher frequently recorded videos, sharing them on Instagram as a personal diary for her friends. However, it was only three years later, during her daily train commute to work, that Tortosa Santisteban began taking the first screenshots of her favorite frames.

A group of schoolchildren, a few passersby on bicycles, and the laborers in the rice field accompany the passage of time and her own journey of integration into a new country. Her attentive gaze unconsciously dialogues with two Japanese concepts. Nichijō (日常), which literally translates to "daily life" or "routine" but, from a philosophical perspective, elevates the ordinary to a place of spiritual practice and profound wonder. Mono no aware (物の哀れ), which signifies a deep "empathy toward things" or "pathos of things." and describes that blend of melancholy and admiration felt when observing the transient nature of life, where the beauty of a moment is amplified by the awareness that it will fade.

In Japan, time is not seen merely as a straight line running from the past to the future, but as a perpetual cycle – Shiki (四季), the four seasons – in which the contemplation of the present moment plays a fundamental role. This collection of screenshots invites us to pause and reflect on our relationship with daily life and the way we view, record, and preserve our memories, within a cultural context where everything happens so rapidly and is just as quickly forgotten.

Over the years, the author has recorded more than 2,000 videos and taken around 3,000 screenshots. It is precisely within the seemingly most insignificant details of everyday life, where nothing extraordinary appears to happen, that we can find enlightenment: a heron landing, the rustle of rice leaves in the wind, the shifting light. Today, more than five years after her first video, Tortosa Santisteban still goes out to film before work, renewing her voyeurism for the ordinary and her belief in the power of small stories.

About The Artist

Cintia Tortosa Santisteban (b. 1989) is a Spanish photographer based in Kanagawa, Japan. She studied English literature, linguistics, and education at the University of Granada (Spain) and the University of Galway (Ireland). Currently working as an English teacher in Japan, she has no formal background in photography or the arts, having developed her practice independently through books, online resources, and peers. Although she has been interested in the visual arts since childhood, it wasn’t until late 2019 that she began pursuing photography seriously. In 2025, her ongoing work, Screenshots From A Series Of Videos About A Rice Field And Its Surroundings, was published by Chose Commune.