Maria López and Josephine Gerhardt

We are Maria and Josephine, an artist duo created in 2020 world pandemic, based in Lisbon, Portugal and Karlsruhe, Germany. We are two friends from Portugal and Germany, and we meet while studying in Porto in 2018. Our love for Latin America and Chile, where we both lived before, our will to share artistic experiences and our passion for dancing was what brought us together, ultimately wanting to create something collectively.

Our project is rooted in the pandemic situation and started in July after the first lock-down, when we had the chance to meet in Porto. We were going to be living in two far away cities and we did not know how the covid situation would develop, so we decided to create an art project together, integrating timing and distance challenges.

Every two weeks, we would send our artwork to each other and every time it would be an answer to the other’s previous designs.

This way, we would create two parallel narratives, alternating each one’s work. There were no medium constraints, and we started with the first two proposals based on the “telefone estragado” concept. This is a Portuguese game where someone whispers a word in a person’s ear, who then whispers it to the next person, who whispers it to the next one, until last person playing listens and says it out loud. The purpose is to see how the word has changed completely while travelling between people, illustrating how we change interpretations very quicky. This was the starting point, but also the logic that guides all the project, which is made from interpretations of last weeks’ proposal.

This project has been developing since July 2020, and it’s still happening. In December we reached the 12nd week, and we wanted to print it in a physical format. Unfortunately, in January our countries entered a very strict lockdown, which made it almost impossible for us to join in the same space or even print our ideas.

Therefore, we decided to share our narratives in a digital format instead, starting with an Instagram account, which we found to be very practical to communicate the project flow, splitted in two parallel columns. Also we decided to bring a second point of view to our biweekly exchange by adding a word to the artwork we produce.