Blue Skies: My Battery is Low and It’s Getting Late by Rubiane Maia & Tom Nóbrega

As the Sars-Covid 19 pandemic escalated, Rubiane Maia was in Folkestone, England, and Tom Nobrega in Tarapoto, in the Peruvian Amazon. They were both surprised by the sudden need to cancel their planned travels to Brazil, their homeland. Though they were used to being foreigners, since Rubiane is currently based in the UK, and Tom has been living a nomadic life for more than eight years, the closed borders brought insolite situations and an unfamiliar feeling of exile. As the news coming from Brazil reach them over distance like stones breaking their computer screens, blurring the lines between what is personal and what is collective, the pair of friends share their perplexity and tries to find some resonance amidst the overwhelming amount of information floating through the virtual space.

Rubiane Maia and Tom Nobrega met in 2010, and throughout ten years of friendship and collaboration they have often witnessed deep changes in each other’s ways of living, thinking and creating, which often came to be through complex processes of rupture, relocation and reinvention. Though they would rarely be able to be present at the same place and the same time, they have always found ways to communicate over distance.

The Blue Skies Conversation Series is produced by International Curators Forum with support from Art Fund.