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Work done together with artist Eva Merendes along a very strange year, 2020

A planed visit to Madrid that never happened. On the 2nd April I would have seen Ivan that I was so longing for. Amid a global pandemic that just had started, visiting him was doomed to fail. All flights were cancelled. I remained put in London and Ivan in Madrid.

The fear of the impact of this forced separation that would have on our relationship fed the need to commit to the creation of 1247.

While trying to process all of these, an issue we faced was the anticipation of engaging all of our senses into the game. Technology is a big asset on maintaining our connection, however there are few things that really cannot be replaced. We could see and hear each other but we couldn’t taste, smell and touch each other. Ivan and me were not able to physically create shared experiences, share the same environment or objects and of course sex was out of the table. That was the generator of my fear of being forgotten. This made us think how two lovers, forced to be apart, experience the relationship in a modern world amidst COVID-19.

Since we are both artists and the need to capture our feelings and express them are vital for us, we decided to use photography and art as a way to capture our postmodern love story. For 1247 we mainly used the cameras on our phones to capture these moments of our separated lives and we were uploading them on shared folders, at last an ‘environment’ we could both visit. By documenting our separated environments, ourselves and engaging in a dialogue through art and photography we were trying to feed our cravings for connecting with each other.

Eva was supposed to arrive to Madrid on the 2nd of April. One month later we, the people from Madrid, rebel against the invader Napoleon in 1808. But that week, in 2020, we were fighting another invader, something very small, something called virus, originated in China.

Needless to say, Eva didn´t arrive. We, both artists and lovers remain in a forced, not wanted, connected separation, she in London, and me in Madrid.

One thousand two hundred and forty seven kilometres away. The precise distance between her house in the South of London, and mine in the North of Madrid. That number, translated into years, 1247 is when Qin Jiushao publisehd an important book about mathematics, not far away from Wuhan.

The situation, a not welcome black swan, force us to rethink what is a couple, what is friendship, at the end, what is the difference between being physically together and not. You cannot see things together, you only can see your own environment, and the other person theirs. Quite a lot of the things you normally share are lost, and loosing is the initial step of forgetting. The chemical glue that bonds people together fights the phenomenal competitor that distance is.

Being photography generally a tool for all to remember. This work, 1247, documents Eva and me during this time. Produced by four hands, shows our environment, shows ourselves, and keep record of the artistic dialogue produced along the process. Composed of pics mostly taken with our mobile phones which were uploaded on a daily basis into a common file in the cloud.