“W.O.R.M. / 2022“ is the title of the exhibition that Christto & Andrew (San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1985, and Johannesburg, South Africa, 1987) and Sarah & Charles (Brussels, Belgium, 1981 and 1979) will present on March 21, 2025, at House of Chappaz, Barcelona. Probably, by the time you read this, that future will already be the past.
Inhabiting the gap between the past and the future means constructing our existence based on past events, generating imaginaries that reflect the moment in which they are born. Christto & Andrew reinterpret these imaginaries with a nostalgia for the futures of the 1960s and 1980s, using photography to project that “past of the future.“ Despite recurring predictions of the end of the world, we continue living on borrowed time, accepting the possibility of other worlds and looking nostalgically at what we once expected.
The project “2022” reflects these “ruins of the future,“ with increasingly shortened projections and more catastrophic forecasts. Following Lee Edelman, who asserts that “there is no imaginary, and it is necessary to build utopias,” and Derek Jarman, who claimed to live within a collective without history and, therefore, without a past, the idea arises that many of us only inhabit the present. Those who live in C. D. Broad’s “block universe” have a present with a past but no future. Even though the world has “ended“ several times, only remnants of what we once expected remain.
The future has ceased to surprise us with advancements such as remote communication. In this context, Sarah & Charles explore strategies that embrace contradiction, suspend meaning, and foster collaboration, creating aesthetic devices that appeal to both visual knowledge and tactile and sensory experiences. Their project “W.O.R.M.” questions miscommunication and message loss, not only due to noise but also due to the self-reproducibility of content. Concepts such as writing, information, knowledge, and understanding are confronted with forms of miscommunication and message distortion.
In this scenario, Sarah & Charles have chosen to position their practice as a search for strategies that embrace contradiction, generating a suspension of meaning. They promote collaborative processes, breaking the isolation of the information society, and produce aesthetic devices that appeal not only to visual knowledge but also to haptic experience, using production tools that are not only visual but also experiential and sensory.
The exhibition “W.O.R.M. / 2022“ is a duo of duos, a collaboration between Christto & Andrew and Sarah & Charles, who, through their complementary approaches, explore the gap between past and future, questioning miscommunication and message distortion. Together, they present an experience that fuses the visual, the tactile, and the sensory, challenging our perceptions of time and knowledge.
