Welcome?: Q&A with Amarist

Amarist is a creative studio based in Barcelona, Spain, founded by artists and designers Arán Lozano and Clara Campo. Childhood friends in a small village in the Pyrenees, Lozano and Campo grew up surrounded by nature and a craftsmanship ethos. Soon they began sharing creative concepts and ideas, and eventually formed an artistic partnership. Amarist Studio enjoys blurring the boundaries between contemporary art, design, and craft, with singular works that are both richly evocative and functional. In 2018, they were featured in Forbes’ “30 Under 30” Arts & Culture Europe edition. They were finalists for the 2018 Global Art Awards and the Bombay Sapphire Artisan Series, and were honored with a Silver award and an Iron award at the A’Design Competition. In 2018, they were selected to exhibit at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, and in 2019 they exhibited at the Priveekollektie Gallery in Heusden, Netherlands. Welcome? is Amarist’s first solo exhibition in the United States.

Welcome? was on view at Hillyer on February 7 – March 1, 2020.

You work as a duo and have other members that are a part of your design studio. Can you give us some background on how you started working together, and how you maintain this relationship now? Do you always work collaboratively on each piece, or are some works created by one of you individually?

Our work relationship started casually, due to the interest and passion of both for the art and design worlds. Little by little, it grew and it professionalized to what is now Amarist Studio.

We always work as a team; we are both involved in the entire creation process, from the conceptual part to the physical execution. We have not set a specific role for each one, but we have organized ourselves in a very natural way to monitor and complement the entire creative process.

You create visually powerful work that invites reflections of the self and society but also reveals the consequences of our actions and interests as a society. Particularly in your exhibition at Hillyer, Welcome?, you focused on one of the most pressing issues of our time—immigration. What kind of responses towards your work have you witnessed? What do you hope the viewer takes away from your work?

When we create a work like Welcome? we try to make the viewers reflect and question themselves. No one leaves the exhibition indifferent and usually everyone has a conversation with themselves about the contradictions we are made of, each one of us as an individual, and as a whole as a society.

We have had all types of reactions towards our work; people have cried, people have laughed, people have sparkled very interesting and deep debates, and a few even have insulted us. The most beautiful thing is when dialogues and discussions are generated between strangers, they are all in the same place, observing the same work, but each one does it with a different gaze and background.

Since the end of your exhibition, the world has seen drastic changes due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Spain, in particular, has been hit very hard. Many of the artists here in the US are just starting to deal with what this might mean to their art-making practice. Can you tell us how you have been dealing with it? Much of your work involved complicated fabrication and needs a studio space to create and build. Are you looking at other ways to shift your practice during this time of quarantine?

As observers and thinkers is thought-provoking to see how the current pandemic shows a new social and economic paradigm, it is very interesting to observe the different actions that governments, companies and citizens are taking to overcome the crisis and to adapt to the ‘new normal’. We are also devoting a lot of attention to analyze and try to understand how this health crisis is affecting the global powers and relationships between countries, at all levels, and how it might bring a new shift in world’s center of gravity.

Regarding our daily work, our small structure allows us to adapt to different circumstances. We also do not work linearly; we are always working at the same time on short-term projects and medium or long-term projects.

So in the current situation, with a total lockdown in place in our country, we can’t work on our short-term projects like the physical production of sculptures, but we can and we are working on our long-term projects, developing new ideas and concepts to be developed in the future.

In addition, in our field it is important to be in a constant process of research and learning, so we are now also taking the opportunity to expand that knowledge, learning new skills and how to use innovative digital tools as augmented reality.

In situations of global shutdown and social distancing like this, where the exhibition spaces like museums, galleries, fairs are closed, Augmented Reality will play a very important role and it will definitively be a crucial tool to exhibit artists’ work and to bring art closer to the general public. It is a tool that will literally bring art to people’s homes.

Is there anything else you would like to tell us about? What you are working on now? Dreams for future projects, etc?

Right now we are developing and planning what the studio’s work will be next year. We have been immersed in a research process on the geological formation of the Alabaster stone in the ‘Ribera del Ebro’ (Spain), its use throughout history and the mineral extraction process in the quarries near our studio. The result is a series of creations that will transport the viewer to a landscape of unknown nature, where each sculpture will seem to reveal the main element of the molecular composition of the Alabaster Stone: Water.

Through this concept we are also working on pieces at an architectural scale for public spaces.

Check out Amarist’s Augmented Reality Project HERE and watch the video below to see it in action: