Newsletter  209
November 2021

It is time for harvesting pomegranate, quince and persimmon. In the same time also artists were harvesting. This newsletter tells about the residents and their projects of recent months. Residencies earlier this year are presented on the 2021 page.

Luc van der Velde (Belgium) made a series of land-art installations dedicated to combining natural with artificial materials: a 5 meters high pillar of hay wrapped in plastic, a rubber off print of a tree bark, a 2x4 meters jute tissue covered with local clay,  and more. After having installed them in the landscape he invited residents and friends to join for a walk. It was more than just visiting an open-air art exhibition. It also felt like a procession, a celebration, a contemplation on how we see our surroundings.

Marianne Noordzij (Holland) is a sound artist. She collected sounds from the surroundings (marble, sheep bells, the voice of Anna Maria, ..), manipulated them a bit and made an improvisation with it, using a mixing table. She gave an impressive presentation in an ancient, stone walled meadow, 50 meters from the house.

Gunnþóra Ólafsdóttir (Iceland) was working on a scientific article on the health benefits of nature. That nature has a positive effect on mental and physical health is undisputed in the public domain and is relevant for public health, insurance companies, tourism and nature management. But politics and economy increasingly need solid scientific proof of this presumption.
Gunnþóra was leader of an interdisciplinary project group that did an experiment with young adults exposed to nature. The impact was measured with interviews and bio indicators such as telomerase.  Results were not conclusive, but gave guidance for an effective strategy to proof the hypothesis. Her artist talk triggered a lively discussion on the perceived value of nature.

For Anna Maria Achatz (Austria) the first step in creating art is choosing a colour. With green acrylic ink on 20x30 cm rice paper she made clusters of similar abstract forms. The first object that she took as a starting point for her paintings was a prematurely shed little pomegranate. Later she adapted colour (first yellow and later magenta entered her work) and paper type (including pages of an 80 years old railroad magazine), but not her formal language. At the end of her six-weeks residency she had made more than 150 paintings.

Sherry Wiggins (USA) and Luís Branco (Portugal) are collaborating in the OBRAS residency program already for six years. Their discipline is performative photography, in which Sherry is the performer and Luís the photographer. Their way of creating is highly interactive. See see page Wiggins/Branco for more info. This year they started a new project: “performing” famous mythical women such as Eve, Salome, Medea, Medusa and more. The first images are fascinating: see the slide show. 

Nazaré Soares (Norway, Spain) works on a long-term project: The Witch Trail. The project started as The Witch Trials and focused on lost legends, alchemy and female power. But it is evolving towards an exploration of the spiritual power of nature. Her tools are common from hippies and New Age (offering ceremonies to Goddesses, listening to your soul and to the spirit of objects), but her larger goal is to reconnect to nature. She invites people to bring natural objects closer to both body and mind. Being an artist she feels free to give a personal interpretation to scientific and historical facts and ancient stories.
The residents were invited to participate in two happenings. One was in an abandoned marble quarry and focused on the “wisdom” of rocks, and a second one was an offering ceremony around an ancient well and was dedicated to our relation with water.    
The slide show gives an interpretation of her work at OBRAS.

Natasha Carlos (USA) worked on a long-term project: she makes portraits of parts of herself, surrounded by nature. She, for instance, climbed in a tree, dressed in black trying to merge with the branches of the tree, and showing only her bare foot. She was also experimenting with mirrors in the pasture and with floating flowers. For Natasha the residency was emotional, because she has Portuguese parents.  

Ethna Barry (Canada) is painting intuitively. Her abstract paintings are inspired by elements around her, such as cork and branches covered by lichens, but also summer heat and night sky. In addition to pencils she is using techniques such as dripping and scratching with wooden sticks. She was also experimenting with the third dimension by painting on transparent paper that she hung on a laundry line or by rolling a painting up and fixing it on the wall as a cylinder.
Ethna had a beautiful exhibition in the patio, where her art work communicated surprisingly well with the shadow / light patrons on the white walls and with the lush green of the trees.  

Rob van Weegen (Holland) came to work on a theatre play that tells about a couple that is divorcing. The dialogues are poignant in their indirectness: the man hopes to repair the relation while the woman is sure about her decision to divorce, but both fear the discussion. They both talk about meaningless little things, he to gain some affection, she to avoid the real subject. During his artist talk Rob played a scene together with Gunnþóra. It was very moving.  

Elisabeth Melkonyan (Austria) brought a role of paper: 20 cm wide and 30 meters long. She started drawing and painting on it three years ago and finished at OBRAS. It shows small natural elements that she found during her traveling. To exhibit it in full length the big hall was too small. She needed a 10m extension outside.  Elisabeth made other sculptural works, both inside her studio and outside, inspired by nature as well as work of Sherry Wiggins. A recurring subject in Elisabeth´s work is the ocean. She presented several pieces that relate to it.

Holly Osborn (USA) was painting both figurative and abstract, and in increasing sizes: she started on panels of 20x30 cm panels and ended with canvases of 1x1,5 m. Her sources of inspiration were diverse as well: her own studio and the trees around the house, as well as the abandoned marble quarries. Holly worked many hours per day, but, fortunate for all fellow residents: she found time to show her amazing cooking talents. 

Stefano Falcone (Italy) is jazz pianist and composer. During his residency he composed nine pieces for piano solo that will soon be released on CD. These nine pieces were premiered two weeks later on the Piano Festival in Lecce (24 September). Stefano granted his fellow residents a wonderful short living-room concert. He improvised after having collected the wishes of his audience on aspects such as mood, tempo and tonality. 

Tim Gleason (USA) was sketching every day: sometimes abstract, sometimes objects from his direct surroundings, sometimes conceptual. He fixed every work on the wall of his studio until he had filled the full surface of 10 to 6 m. The video gives an impression. At the end of his residency he put all works in his suitcase, because they are meant to be building stones for big paintings that he will make at home.
The music in this video is an improvisation by a fellow resident: Stefano Falcone (see also elsewhere in this newsletter). 

also good to know:

For OBRAS Holland we bought an electronic piano, quite a good one (Roland FP-30X). We hope to please composers, musicians and sound-artists with it. Soon we will also have some basic audio tools. The pastel drawing behind the piano is of Jacobien de Rooij.  

In November, Foundation OBRAS made a kind of a new start. It got two new board members, it updated the Statutes and House Governance Rules, and adopted the new regulations and codes on Governance Culture, on Fair Practice and on Diversity & Inclusion. 

OBRAS ended its residency program for this year. In 2021 it hosted 51 residents (57 residencies; some residents had more than one residency). 20% were writers/poets, 16% painters, 14% actors, 12% film- and videomakers and 8% musicians/sound-artists. The other 30% were mixed and other disciplines. The residency were evenly distributed over the age categories <40, 40-60 and >60.

Dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has the biggest show of his career, and he is doing it in a country he’s fallen in love with: Portugal. The artist ticks off what appeals to him about Portugal: the slow pace of life, very open” people, very acceptable food and abundant sunshine.
Ai arrived in Portugal in 2019 and has no plans to return to Germany or England, where he has also lived since leaving China in 2015. He bought a house near Montemor, 40 kms from OBRAS. “I always make decisions by my personal instinct. I feel comfortable here. Remaining in Portugal was probably the best decision I ever made,” Ai said.
His new exhibition, “Rapture” (11 June until 28 November, in the Cordoaria Nacional in Lisbon). It shows 85 pieces including some of his iconic works, as well as new ones produced in Portugal. “Forever Bicycles,” from 2015, a giant sculpture using 960 stainless steel bicycles as building blocks, stands at the entrance to the building. Ai's 16-meter-long (52-foot-long) black inflatable boat with human figures, which alludes to the migration crisis, is also in Lisbon.
Ai has traveled across Portugal visiting craftspeople to learn about using traditional Portuguese materials such as marble, textiles, hand-painted tiles and cork.

We visited the exhibition of Ai Weiwei, and all of a surprise we met him in person (!). And even more of a surprise: he had heard about us and said "being nearly neighbors I should like to visit you" (!!) Let us see what the future brings us.