Cintia Tortosa Santisteban On Her Exhibition Screenshots From A Series Of Videos About A Rice Field At PhMuseum Lab

Showcased at PhMuseum Lab through the 2025 Women Photographers Grant, Cintia’s Screenshots From A Series Of Videos About A Rice Field reflects on looking, fleeting moments, seasonal changes, and the rhythms of an everyday landscape.

Spanish artist Cintia Tortosa Santisteban began filming from the balcony of her fifth-floor apartment in Japan, where a rice field became a point of continuity. What started as an intuitive habit gradually developed into a long-term project, following the movements of farmers, children, and passers-by as they appeared and disappeared across the landscape.

Since 2021, she has built an archive of thousands of videos documenting the scenery around her home. The selected frames capture moments of transition, shifting seasons, changing colors, and encounters that might otherwise remain unnoticed. Her first book, published by Chose Commune, gathers around one hundred images from this archive, transforming a personal record into a reflection on movement, stillness, and our relationship with familiar places. 

With the 2026 Women Photographers Grant, now in its 10th edition, opened for submissions on 8 September and offering again the opportunity to solo exhibit at PhMuseum Lab in 2027, we spoke with Cintia about her way of looking, the process and the questions behind her work. 

Her work will be on view from 1–4 October on the occasion of PhMuseum Days 2026, with a special guided tour led by the artist on Thursday 1 October 1 at 3:30 pm.

Ciao Cintia, let's start with the place where it all began, the balcony. For years, it became the starting point of your daily observations. What made this “ordinary” view worth returning to again and again? 

Before I moved to the apartment, my partner had already been living there for a while. I remember him telling me that he used to feed bread to the ducks from the balcony. I couldn’t help but wonder: what kind of house allows you to feed ducks from your balcony? I had never imagined there was a field and a river just below. I moved there in May 2021, around the time when the field usually starts getting ready for planting. I wasn’t even sure it was a rice field until I saw a couple of farmers working there. That same day, one of them waved at me while I was filming, a moment that later became the last image in my book. From then on, I began returning to the balcony more often, filming whatever caught my attention. The field became a constant source of inspiration, revealing new stories through changing seasons, daily rhythms, and small encounters.

Over time, what began as a daily habit gradually grew into something much larger. Was there a particular moment when your project became a body of work?

When I started making the videos, I was going through many changes in my life: I was new to the country, adapting to life after COVID, and getting used to a new house and a new city. Everything around me felt unfamiliar, and the field became a point of continuity. The process was intuitive and free from expectations. I wasn’t trying to create a project; I was simply observing and recording what was happening in front of me. Around May 2024, I started taking screenshots from the videos during my daily commute because I realized how much material I had accumulated. A few months later, I shared some of them for the first time under the title Screenshots From A Series Of Videos About A Rice Field And Its Surroundings.

A screenshot is, by definition, a fragment taken from a continuous flow of images. What interested you in isolating these single moments from something that was originally meant to keep moving? 

I have always loved movies and often take screenshots from scenes that stay with me. I approached this project in a similar way: as a way of transforming fleeting digital moments into something more tangible. You cannot print a moving image, but you can isolate individual frames and turn them into physical objects. In the end, cinema itself is made of sequences of still images. My initial idea was simply to create an album as a personal archive, but the project eventually evolved into a book, which opened up a completely new dimension. 

For years, you were the one observing the landscape. Through the exhibition, you now become a spectator of your own work, as it is experienced and interpreted by others. How does it feel to see such an intimate, long-term project enter a public exhibition space?

Once the work is shared with the public, it becomes more than just my own experience; it becomes a shared encounter. Although this work is deeply connected to my daily life over several years, I don’t feel the need to protect it or control how it is interpreted. Every viewer brings their own experiences and way of seeing to the work, and that openness is one of the things I value most about photography and art. Sometimes I even feel like a spectator myself, as if I were encountering the work from the outside. It is a reminder that once a project leaves the artist’s hands, it develops its own life.

At PhMuseum Lab, the project takes on a new material and spatial form. How does this new presentation of notes, screenshots, and videos shape the experience of the work?

The exhibition brings together the different worlds where the work exists: the digital and the material. I was especially drawn to the way my writings and the long strips of washi paper create a sense of continuity and repetition. The installation reflects the cyclical nature of the project itself: the changing seasons, daily routines, and the act of returning to the same place over and over again.

Since you are currently based in Japan, the exhibition was developed almost entirely through online conversations with the PhMuseum team. What was it like to build an exhibition together without being physically present?

It was a wonderful experience. Of course, I wish I could have been present throughout the whole process, because human interaction can never be fully replaced by a screen. However, the PhMuseum team made the collaboration feel very personal. Giuseppe, Rosa, Camilla, Stella, and the whole team cared about every detail and adapted to the time difference to make the process work.

Sometimes we had video calls after I finished my teaching job, with my classroom and its children’s posters behind me, which always seemed to amuse Giuseppe. They constantly valued my input and made me feel seen. Through their perspective, I felt that the project was special and that they wanted to present it in the best possible way. I believe the work became richer through their contribution. Experiencing a project through someone else’s eyes is always fascinating, as they can notice things you might never have considered yourself.

The exhibition at PhMuseum Lab places your work in conversation with the Japanese concepts of nichijō (日常), the appreciation of everyday life and routine, and mono no aware (物の哀れ), the empathy toward things and the awareness of their impermanence. How did you respond to this curatorial perspective?

These concepts were not consciously part of my process when I started making the videos. I was not trying to illustrate a particular philosophy or narrative. However, when the PhMuseum team introduced these ideas, I recognized a strong connection with the way I had been approaching the work. In a way, the curatorial process allowed me to discover new aspects of my own project and understand it from a different perspective.

As a recipient of the PhMuseum 2025 Women Photographers Grant, what advice would you give to future applicants?

I would say the most important thing is to enjoy what you do, believe in your work, follow your gut, and trust your own taste. For a long time, I thought that my work was too simple. I worried that I hadn’t used a good camera, that the images were too grainy, that I wasn’t technically skilled enough, or that my pictures were too imperfect. In the end, I realized that none of those things mattered as much as I thought they did.

Even if you are not selected, I would still encourage people to apply. The application process itself teaches you a lot and makes you reflect on your own work, taking it out of your own head and the digital space where it exists and allowing it to become part of the material world. It might take you somewhere you never expected.

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Cintia Tortosa Santisteban (b. 1989) is a Spanish photographer living and working in Kanagawa, Japan. She studied English Literature, Linguistics, and Education at the University of Granada and the University of Galway. Currently an English teacher at a Japanese school, she has developed her photographic practice independently through self-study, extensive reading, and dialogue with peers. Although she has been interested in the visual arts since childhood, it was not until late 2019 that she began dedicating herself to photography. In 2025, her long-term project, Screenshots From A Series Of Videos About A Rice Field And Its Surroundings, was published by Chose Commune.

The PhMuseum Women Photographers Grant, now in its 10th edition, aims to empower the work and careers of female and non-binary professionals of all ages and from all countries working in diverse areas of photography. Its mission is to support the growth of new generations and promote stories narrated from a female perspective while responding to the need to work for gender equality in the industry. This year, PhMuseum Lab will offer a new solo show to one artist selected from our open call. You are welcome to present your work before 15 October 2026, and take advantage of the reduced entry fee until 24 September, 11.59 pm (GMT). Learn more and apply at phmuseum.com/w26.