“There is another world, but it is in this one,” said Surrealist poet Paul Éluard. In this exhibition, artists look to the future, imagining how we move forward from the tumultuous events of the past year. [read more]
Art in the Plague Year is an online exhibition organized by UCR ARTS: California Museum of Photography and curated by Douglas McCulloh, Nikolay Maslov, and Rita Sobreiro Souther. UCR ARTS’s programs are supported by UCR College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, the City of Riverside, Altura Credit Union, and Anheuser-Busch.
All works in this exhibition are reproduced with permission of the artists/copyright holders. Works (images, video, audio or other content) must not be used or reproduced for any purposes other than fair use without prior consent of the artists.
(b. 1980 and 1979, Lisbon, Portugal. Live and work in Lisbon)
Sara & André base their practice in collaboration. “We often invite other artists to do work for us, friends to speak on our behalf. Forced into isolation, we turned to nature as our collaborator. We let the elements do the work for us, diligently manipulating the process with small but intentional gestures, leaving the rest to chance.”
When the Covid-19 lockdown started in Portugal around mid-March, the pair escaped to a friend’s empty house on the Atlantic Ocean. Told they could stay as long as they wished, they did. “In the first few days, we found a couple of magazines in the yard, which were already pretty interesting because they were weathered from all those years (?) exposed to the elements. We decided to start ‘working’ on them.” For three months or so, Sara & André opened different pages each day. They left them exposed to sun, rain, dust, and fog. “When the pages got stuck together, we carefully separated them, sometimes creasing them or leaving other types of marks. This daily routine was repeated until we were ready to return to our apartment in Lisbon, and at this moment, around mid- June, we chose the best pages and threw the rest of the magazines away. The three pages we kept are among the few ‘artworks’ that we have produced this year.”
