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Marina and Cecília Resende Santos
Marina and Cecília Resende Santos

Add together a rusty six-foot-tall octagonal steel frame left over from a previous installation, an empty lot overgrown with grasses, a dozen artists recently released from stage 1 quarantine, and what do you get? All sorts of possibilities. Marina and Cecília Resende Santos’s project, Open sheds used for what?, intends its titular question. The answers have varied since the sisters installed the eight-sided structure on June 6 in the Bridgeport neighborhood of Chicago, and they have kept coming as it split in two, became enclosed, and was taken apart and moved to a new property after the owner of the vacant lot put up fencing. It has since been rebuilt and covered, with more iterations to come until its planned disbanding in mid-August. What this has looked like is as diverse as an open system can hope to be. Marina took the octagon as a prop within which to dance. Hanna Gregor used its widened interior to bake and share flatbread. Graham Livingston draped its walls with sod, creating not just an earthy space but a material continuance between the shed and the ground on which it rose. May it keep standing as long as there is need for it. And may there be more to come.

—Lori Waxman 2020-07-26 9:06 AM