Travessia

It started with the idea of interval and cross.
Spaces in between, spaces that form borders. What is this space?
- Border is an interval between two countries-she said.
- But to whom does it belong?-I said.
- Maybe it doesn’t belong to anyone -she said.

An invented book

In 2012 we created José J. Santos: a Portuguese sailor that had be sent to Portsmouth to study nautical electronics in 1924. We invented a sailor who had the opportunity to see Gertrude Ederle swimming the English Channel in 1926. Gertrude was the first woman on earth to accomplish this feat. Impressed by Ederle’s capacity, José J. Santos began a diary on the idea of crossing spaces, crossing nobody lands and overcome ourselves. José J. Santos and his book Travessia (Crossing) were the trigger for a project about spaces in between
On March 2012 we crossed the English Channel by boat. We wanted to be in between: between countries, in the sea. To whom does the sea belong?


After the sea

In Le Havre, France we investigated and reflected on the question “to whom does the sea belong?” We met real people that could have been José J. Santos himself. We split the sea and sent it back, to the other side of the English Channel in the shape of a letter and we wrote:
How do you erase a border?
How do you erase something you can’t touch?
From this project we made a series of 42 letters with 42 sea pieces; a series of drawings where the textures and landscapes from Le Havre overlapped photographs of boats crossing the Channel; a book on Erasing the Horizon and a film documenting the whole process.