Roberto Santaguida is the holder of the Research-Creation in oncology and immunology – ICI/Iméra Chair. His project at Iméra, the Institute for Advanced Study of Aix-Marseille University, explores the intersection of contemporary art and cancer treatment, focusing on the science of immunotherapy and its representation through language, imagery, and cultural narratives. The project examines how language is used to represent cancer, driven by imagery and challenging dominant paradigms around treatment, recovery, and the emotional terrain they encompass. It approaches immunotherapy through metaphor, sensation, and poetics, aiming for a multidisciplinary conversation between art and science. One component of the project visualizes the process of T-cells being activated to target cancer cells as poetic evocation rather than scientific illustration, using abstraction, movement, light, and sound to convey the emotional texture of the body's transformation. The project also integrates a social dimension, considering how the language used to understand cancer affects patients and clinicians.
To learn more, view his resident page by clicking here
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Video transcript
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0:07 My name is Roberto Santaguira. I'm a documentary filmmaker and video artist based in Canada. My work explores how memory and personal stories find form in moving images. What compels me is less the recording events than how lives are recast and reimagined on screen. I'm drawn to how film and video can introduce a different form of perception and allows for a slow down reflection. As the ICI-MRR Research Creation Chair in Oncology and Immunology, I'm at work on a project called Fragments of Recovery. It sits at the intersection of art and science.
0:51 It is a meditation on cancer treatment and the fragile promise of immunotherapy. At the center of the work is the body's own defenses, T-cells, translating diagrams and data into a visual form. Patients and clinicians will lend their voices and the story will be told in fragments of knowledge and memory. My background in film has long focused on personal stories and perspectives left aside. In recent years I've been drawn to the language of illness and how these words shape lives. The language of cancer I've come to see has both weight and constraint.
1:28 That tension pulls me towards a video installation that opens a conversation that belongs as much to the imagination as it does to medicine. At the Institute Paoli-Calmet, I hope to have exchanges with cancer researchers and healthcare workers. Their expertise in the body, in the systems of care and repair, is something I want to learn from. The aim is a dialogue that runs deeper than the technical, touches on experience, and how illness is lived and understood. I hope that the work will be presented in a form that offers a wider audience a chance to
2:04 reflect on how science, art, and daily life entangle.
