Featured Series: María Luisa Sanín

4/6/20 - Bogota, Columbia

“I had a one-on-one session with a curator at a fellowship program I am enrolled in, in Zagreb, Croatia. She told me about a city in China which was left completely at a standstill because of a virus. Since then, COVID-19 would show up in the background in news stories, memes, hand-washing instruction videos. I had messages from my family with advice on avoiding crowded spaces. It all seemed a bit sensationalist. Croatia shares a border with Italy, and I believe the first case was a man returning from Italy from a soccer match. One weekend the participants of the program and I travelled to Vienna for an opening at the Kunsthalle. I remember on the border on the way back the agent took my passport and my ID card for a really long time, while the rest of the line looked on and fidgeted nervously. Back on the bus one of my friends from the program said he asked if we went through Italy, and another friend who speaks Croatian told me he had talked about quarantine. That’s when things started to be tense, but everything really came to a halt the Monday after coming back. We had a group Skype call with two of the curators running the program, in which they told us the whole program had been moved online, and strongly urged us to fly home if possible. It was a great shock, since only a few days ago we were working on a group show we had in a Museum in Rijeka, as well as a few other projects. It was as if everything had changed overnight. That Thursday I flew back to Bogotá. These works are, really simply, about the anxiety of the situation, of the quarantine, the uncertainty about the future. This is such a mundane and yet urgent moment, and making them has been a way for me to channel these contradictory emotions.”

Follow María’s body of work here

Featured Series: Marlyn Garcia ( Kool Me )

4/6/20 - Austin, TX

“I have been working on a series called “NightCrawler” in which I have photographed different cities in different countries, showcasing the magic of each city at night. In this series I decided to take our current events and showcase them with what I have been doing for a while, night crawling through the city. This was a collaboration between the model and myself. We talked about how our daily life has changed and what our future might hold. Capturing the city as a completely empty space felt so surreal, just like a movie.

I was residing in Austin, TX while COVID-19 went down, and literally the last day before we got the news that we will be in quarantine we had been out photographing the city and capturing this series. I was glad I acted fast and went out and captured before we weren't allowed.”

Follow their work here