Ana Cichowicz
Ana Cichowicz is a Brazilian artist and social anthropologist based in Berlin. After completing her PhD, Ana moved to Italy and later to Germany. It was through this migratory experience that her photographic practice deepened. In 2022, she began engaging with photography more seriously, driven by a desire not only to study images academically but also to explore the creative act of making them.
Her work emerges at the intersection of art, philosophy, and anthropology. She is particularly interested in world-making practices, natures and the environment, foreignness and migration, childhood and memory, and the poetics of everyday street life. Whether working with performative, documentary, or street photography, her practice is grounded in an ongoing inquiry into the ontological condition of the image.
For Ana, photography is not about portraying reality, but about bringing things into being—a poetic and political gesture that opens fissures in the real, allowing life and worlds to emerge.
Her photographs have received awards at international festivals and have been exhibited in galleries and biennials around the world.
Website: www.anacichowicz.com
Instagram: @anacichiwicz
Ana Cichowicz Folio
The photos shown here belong to various projects, which can be viewed on Ana’s personal website.
“praxinoscope” number 1
How Many Birds Are We Made Of? by Ana Cichowicz
Our galaxy is called the Milky Way in English, a name that evokes a symbolic image shared across many languages. This imagery traces back to a Greek myth in which Zeus placed his mortal-born son, Heracles, at the breast of the goddess Hera while she slept, hoping the child would nurse and become immortal. When Hera awoke to find an unknown baby feeding from her, she pushed him away, and drops of milk spilled across the sky, forming the Milky Way.
In Finnish, however, our galaxy is called Linnunrata—the “path of the birds.” Birds also appear in the origin stories of the Finno-Ugric languages. One such myth tells of our world being born from the breaking of an egg laid by a waterfowl on an island in the primordial sea. From what was held within that egg, our world took shape.
And then I wonder: How many birds are we made of?
TECHNICAL NOTES: All the photos were taken in Berlin in May 2025 with a Ricoh GR III. The bird-like hands belong to my eldest son; the boy with skin like eggshells is my youngest. I enjoy including my children in my photographic projects. For this one, we immersed ourselves in myths about our universe, speaking at length about the influence of Greco-Roman mythology on Western thought, and about how, despite being so well known, these are far from the only stories. There are countless ways to tell a story — whether about the world, or about the things of the world — through words or through images.
