Martinka Bobrikova & Oscar de Carmen

Martinka Bobrikova & Oscar de Carmen have been working together as an artistic duo since 2005. Our practice, which is often community based, aims at setting up new social ecosystems. We use artistic expression as a didactic strategy that transcends the limits of everyday life and art to question relationships between ethics, aesthetics and social coexistence.

We focus our socio-political and economic art practices on the theories about utopian societies that respond to a model of self-sustainability in an ecological, economic, political or social context. We work in relation to the collaborative practices though research, sharing knowledge, unlearning and learning again using contextual (as opposed to purely conceptual) way of thinking and acting and elaborate on the meanings and differences that exist between the “I” and the “we” of a collective process.

We work around the idea of an open interaction with the art world beyond the dialogue of what can be considered institutional or not, to see our art practice as a single space of coexistence and confluence. We believe that this context is emerging as one of the only exchanging environments to promote social transformation. This approach allows us to investigate our social habits, questioning the mechanisms and contexts which creates powerful current systems of values.

Since 2012 we run Nomad AiR, a Nomadic artist-in-residence program focuses on the notion of hospitality and the social relations between “host” and “guest” and in 2017, together with Linnea Larsson we co-funded the project / residency program Future Utopia Community Key which is dedicated to the activities in the rural village of Uddebo and the area. The project is a collaborative agency, dedicated to new social bonding and community building.