Newsletter  180
November 2019

We are still waiting for the autumn rains. The quinces are ripe and roses start flowering again.
This newsletter tells about residents and their projects in October. Earlier residencies are on page residents 2019.

On 8 October we had a fantastic concert in our piano room by Mauro Dilemma (piano), Andeia Vaz (violin) and Beate Schnaithmann (cello). With works of Peter Ludwig and Astor Piazzolla, the tango was the read thread in the program. Their excellent playing was vibrant, romantic, powerful, dreamy and hypnotizing all in one. They first played together in April and decided that they may go for a trio. The musicians considered this concert to be just a try out. That means a lot for the future.

Sarah Millar (UK) was working on a book with narrative non-fiction stories with many autobiographical details. The book's structure has four elements: character/setting/theme/conflict and  are woven together by the narrator´s inner dialogue. Sarah impressed everybody at her reading, both because her personal story is far from mainstream and because her style and wording are original and swinging: conscious prose poetry, she named her style.

Maria Hannson (Sweden) is singer and performative artist. “Natural Opera” was the title her project. She came to OBRAS to explore her voice: to go beyond singing genres and find her expression in the performative arts. Maria brought several masks to perform with. The mask changes the perception of the voice, both for the audience and for herself. She showed this in a short performance in the hallway of our house.
Maria got some unique experiences. One was singing while (voluntarily) been locked up in the fortress of Evoramonte. But most were in abandoned marble quarries. In two she danced, partly in the water and in another she had a photo shoot with Pedro Ferro. Almost certainly these experiences will have follow ups in Sweden or elsewhere.

Karen Bernard (USA) is a dancer and performance artist. She created and executed a beautiful performance about trauma due to a murder. In minimalistic movements Karen played the roles of victim, witness and murderer.  Central in the scene was a costume from her past, a bright yellow and black body suit. The costume is more than an object in the crime scene. It has a personality that has experienced physical terror. In fact there were more participants in this performance. One was a colleague dancer: Lisa Parra, who was filmed some time ago dancing in the same body suit and now projected on the wall. In fact Karin and Lisa were doing a duet. The other participants were the audience. They were sitting on stage in a formation that is standard for the members of a grand jury in a juridical trial.

Sherry Wiggins (USA) came to prepare her exhibition that is scheduled for April, May 2020 in the Igreja de São Vicente in Évora. This former church is beautiful but also dominant in its architecture. Sherry took sufficient time to find a lay-out in which her works do not compete, merely integrate and may be even communicate with the building. The exhibition will show a compilation of photos that Luís Branco made in an intense collaboration with Sherry in the past four years. She had several brainstorms with him and other residents on title, brochure text and the selection of works.     

Esmeralda Cabral (Canada) grew up on San Miguel, a Portuguese island in the Atlantic. At OBRAS she was working on a book that reflects on having two identities: both Canadian and Portuguese. She explored the longing in the immigrant’s soul to live in two places at once, the search for an own version of “home”. This essay is built up with stories of wild weather, culinary adventures and Portuguese bureaucracy and is often very funny. The book will get the title: How to Clean a Fish.

Cello player Beate Schnaithmann (Germany, currently living in Switzerland) came for rehearsals of her trio with Mauro Dilemma and Andreia Vaz, which was formed in April this year. They gave a very beautiful concert: see elsewhere on this page.
Beate spent most of her only free day on a visit to an abandoned marble quarry. And she played the cello at sunset: see the slideshow and be impressed.     

Wilma Geldof (Holland) was writing on her newest novel: about a boy who confesses that he murdered his mother (even although going the story this fact is getting less clear). A deeper layer of the novel is a contemplation on an unhealthy tight bond between mother and sun. Wilma surprised herself with how productive she was and nevertheless found time for interactions with fellow residents. But she was also still a bit in an euphorian state because of the success of the book that was just published: Het Meisje met de Vlechtjes. It will be translated into minimum four languages and it got the White Raven award, which means extra promotion.

Julia da Conceicão Estevão (Holland) was exploring the sense of feeling home. This subject partly reflected her personal situation: her parents are from two countries and she just decided to move from Amsterdam to Berlin.
Julia researched a sense of home. To her this is found in the body and in a connection to the surroundings. Every day she walked and in nature she intends to create (in the words of Nietzsche) art that breathes.One project took shape in a circle of leaflets that she felt having a relation with her feeling of home. Another project, after having seen the embroideries on the farmers market, was making her own version in colors that she found in nature. She made flower-like forms that combine a sense of home and of nature.

Scott Wixon (USA) made a series of 12 abstract paintings in water colour. His starting point is generally an amorphous form that reminds to a micro-organism. And then he adds forms by association. The final result was in all cases very convincing, both in terms of artistic skills and in compositional quality.

Richie Mendelsohn (USA) was making sound and music compositions, using both the available music instruments and his own electronic equipment. One was “requiem for a snail”, made after he accidentally stepped on it. He also gave us some insight of the way he was composing.

Iosef Yusupov and Yelena Yusupova came to work on designs for theatre productions in Azerbaijan and China. Although Iosef and Yelena live in Manhattan and work worldwide, they strongly feel their roots: Iosef was born in Tajikistan and his ancestors came from Spain and Morocco. Yelena is from Saint Petersburg.
Iosef is set designer, especially for opera productions, but also for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Soshi (2014). In their artist talk he showed the scale models and the making of. Yelena is costume designer. They share a passion for painting. They brought and exhibited ten drafts of posters, all hand painted, for events they were involved in. They clearly show the Eastern influence, especially of the Russian avant-garde of the beginning of the 20th century.  

Xinjian and Shan Du (China, currently living in Canada) had a residency in OBRAS-Holland. Assisted by Shan, Xinjian made a large body of work. In his paintings he vaguely suggests narratives and art historical references, but first of all he tried to visualize his perception on human existence and as part of it his environmental concern. Thanks to Robert Kamphuis, Xinjian got the opportunity to exhibit part of his work in a gallery of Wageningen University (Impulse; until 21 November).

Sahar Gilani (UK) came to OBRAS-Holland to feel solitude, nature and space to create her art, especially as she felt trapped within the boundaries of a city. Inspired by the works of Francesca Woodman she created a body of work surrounding her identity and relationship with nature, using herself and surroundings as the subject.
Images of her work will be added in an update of this newsletter.

Also nice to know:

Flor was in Manhattan!
During her residency in June Anna Ortiz painted imagined Astek deities and patron saints of the Mexican diaspora. For one painting Flor was modelling: our cat that lost an eye and an ear at an accident, but miraculously survived. And now his portrait was shown in Manhattan !

Los Dioses de los Pochos. Exhibition with paintings by Anna Ortiz. October 2 – 27, 2019. PROTO GOMEZ gallery. 13 Monroe Street, New York NY 10002.
Anna is a first-generation Mexican, living in Brooklin. The paintings depict fantastical pre-Cortesian idols set against psychological backdrops. Los Dioses de los Pochos can be translated The Gods of the Mexican Expats or Chicanos (Americans of Mexican decent). Pocho refers to a bruised surface, like an imperfect or rotting fruit. The experience of the Pocho is often marked by an incomplete belonging to either side (too Mexican for American acceptance and/or too American for Mexican authenticity). It is within these in-between areas that Anna situates this series of paintings.

Victoria Cattoni (Australia) will show her Portuguese works, (partly made during her residency in September) in Gallery One, Dandenong Australia; 7- 30 November. Her galerist describes Victoria´s work as: precariously balanced compositions:puzzling, beautiful and exploratory of the imagination, built upon relationship to place, real and longed for.

"Shadow play" is a short video made by Rob Monaghan. He recorded Beate Schnaithmann playing the cello at night in a marble quarry. Rob and Beate were residents in May 2019.
The video was selected for screening in Ireland (Damer House Gallery, Tipperary, August; Institute Cervantes, Dublin, 21 November) and in Spain (Loop Festival, Barcelona; 11-21 November).