photos: Red rubber route.
Today, we want to share with you a series of photos, it is a bit the opposite of our Finally together again yesterday series which celebrated physical unity and how significant it can be in these difficult times. What was possible for our team where all the members live in Berlin is not the same for these collaborators, friends, families, lovers who did not live in the same country during the pandemic. The artist duo AnaHell and Nathalie Dreier where one of those who were separated by quarantine measures from different countries. We released their quarantine series at the start of the lockdown and it really hit a nerve. This series was produced long before in another context, but it perfectly captured the bizarre atmosphere of the early stages of pandemic measures.
In their new series, they captured the state of not being able to produce work together for their Red Rubber Road series as they are used to. But they found a pretty clever and impressive way to overcome physical distance. I think that perfectly reflects the past few months and how everyone has had to improvise the physical distance they had to maintain with others and how we have learned to replace it digitally. The artists themselves have written great text explaining the background to this series and their work that I couldn’t even start writing with my own words, so I will be sharing their own project description here.
“Photographers AnaHell and Nathalie Dreier are their own protagonists of Red Rubber Road, an ongoing self-portrait project that documents their relationship over the years. Having established an intimate relationship from the age of twelve, they have managed to meet regularly over the years to document their bodily changes and evolutionary desires, despite the oceans that are sometimes separate. In 2011, they started incorporating various role-playing expressions into their photos, which inspired a change of identity and formed the foundation of Red Rubber Road. These images depict the two photographers in a powerful embrace of the unusual and the carnal, mixing with each other and their environment without ever fully revealing their identity. These surrealist compositions present femininity, sexuality, the passage of time and the limits of self. “
“This spring, shortly before their next meeting in rural Spain, the COVID-19 pandemic broke out and their shooting was canceled. When they were already used to remote editing and post-production, before COVID-19 took their portraits remotely, it was unimaginable. Uncertain of the duration of quarantine in their respective countries, they turned to electronic devices to forge a new way of collaborating. After a few trials (and errors) which involved taking self-portraits separately in advance and coordinating the shots via video calls in real time, a tremendous dynamic has occurred. In Together A Part, the artists manage to merge with each other only through a screen, thus transforming its narrative: the screen is no longer just a window on the virtual world, but a concrete object which is metabolized through the display, connecting us, stretching us and morphing us in an almost physical way. “- AnaHell and Nathalie Dreier
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