will be a collaboration between four primary artists, Patrick Scully and Ric Oquita, who will assume lead responsibility for the project, and their artistic associates, Maurício Novais and Christian Matuschek. , for short, will be a combination of performance art and installation art, presented in alternative performance spaces, and the spaces surrounding them. The audience will tour the performance. Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf will provide a loose narrative for the project. Steppenwolf, a story of an outsider, will be used to mirror the lives of expatriate artists. Specifically this will look at artists who left Germany during the Nazi era, the USA during the McCarthy era, Brazil during the dictatorship. These three historical references will be used to reflect on the situation in the USA today. Shadows provide a metaphorical framework for the piece. The artists will explore many physical aspects of shadows, from the tiny shadows of grains of sand on the beach to eclipses, the largest shadows known. They will investigate what shadows reveal on both a physical and metaphysical level.

 will cross borders, literally and figuratively. It will be site specific, and vary considerably from location to location.  will be quatrilingual: Deutsch, English, Español, Português. In its use of language  will construct text so that English and German shadow each other. Similarly, the Spanish and Portuguese will shadow each other. (See the attached vocabulary list). Other artists will be involved in supportive roles, including Andreas Rühlow and Ali Heshmati.

History of the project

Because  is an outgrowth of Nebel & Neblina, the history of Nebel & Neblina will help to explain the origin of .

Nebel & Neblina was Ric Oquita and Patrick Scully's first major collaboration. It premiered in February 1997. It was a hybrid of performance art and installation art, created for and presented in the 24th Street storefront space that Patrick's Cabaret had occupied for ten years, as well as the basement beneath that storefront, and the (very wintry/sub-zero) back yard.

Nebel & Neblina wove together several elements:

• It was a retelling of the story of Hansel and Gretel. This story of two children looking for home had strong resonance for both artists. By 1997, in order to pursue his career as a performer, Ric had been living an extremely nomadic existence for over a decade. At the same time, Patrick was dealing with Patrick's Cabaret having been forced into exile after eight years on 24th Street by the bureaucracy of the city of Minneapolis. Nebel & Neblina was planned to re-open the space, the first event in the space since its closure by the city. Until noon of the opening day of Nebel & Neblina it was unsure if the city would allow the space to be used.

• Fog was used as an overarching metaphor. Nebel and Neblina are the German and Spanish words for fog. Rather than work predictably with fog, the artists looked for the unexpected. Turning expectations around, things like fog, which normally obscure, were used in surprising and uncommon ways to reveal. Moving images (film and video) were projected onto a variety of surfaces: plate glass windows covered with frost, water from a lawn sprinkler running in the sub-zero night, a life-sized house of cards, the snow covered roof of a neighbor's shed, the audiences breath, a bath tub filling with water, steam from a tea kettle. All of these became movie screens.

• Nebel & Neblina rewarded viewers for slowing down to notice the details. In their creative process, Ric and Patrick sometimes took and entire afternoon to watch the pattern of light and shadow creep across the floor and walls of the storefront.

• The show had a script, which the audience read to each other. This script led them through the installation. Patrick and Ric acted as tour guides, often behind the scenes, sometimes appearing in short scenes.

Evolution of the project

 is Ric and Patrick's next joint endeavor. Just as fog was a central metaphor of their last project, shadows are central to this project. The project will develop as these two, collaborating with their partners, research shadows and how shadows resonate in their realities, imaginations, and spirits.

As artists their lives share many themes. They are both artists who work across disciplines. They are both artists whose performances cross cultures, languages, governmental bureaucracies, and oceans.

Between the four artists, they share four languages. Ric lives in New York City; Patrick lives in Minneapolis; Christian lives in Bielefeld, Germany; and Maurício lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Ric speaks Spanish and English and is learning German. Patrick speaks English and German and Portuguese. Christian speaks German and English and is learning Spanish. Maurício speaks Portuguese and Spanish and is learning English.

The four artists converged in Cologne, Germany in July 2002 to work and play in the same space/time for the first time. During that time the project became clear enough to be able to put it on paper here. Rehearsals happened outdoors on sidewalks and in parks, in borrowed theater spaces and rehearsal halls, in apartments, and on field trips to museums, cemeteries, churches and other towns. They involved dance, writing, theater, puppetry, song and drawing. The four artists will be in residence at fabrik, Potsdam in August of 2003 to finish developing Shadows, and will premiere it there in September of 2003. They are working with staff at l'Orangerie in the Volksgarten, Cologne, to also present the work there. Plans are to also show the work in Minneapolis at either Patrick's Cabaret or Illusion Theater, and in New York City and Rio de Janeiro. From there they have dreams of Canada, Mexico, Spain and Portugal.

Between now and August 2003 the four will continue to build the piece, sharing ideas over their website (www.oquita.de click on Shadows). This website is a contribution by Cologne based web artist Andreas Rühlow. A guestbook there allows them to share ideas and discuss the development of the piece in spite of geographical separation. Additionally, travel will allow them to convene in various configurations between now and then. Most probably they will not all four be together again, in one time/space, until August of 2003. This physical separation is seen as a limitation in the creative process, but also a limitation that will inform the process, in the way that limitations often foster creativity. In this new millennium, how can aspects of globalization (the internet, affordable long distance air travel, long distance national and international phone calls) allow artists to work together? They will be exploring that question, not as content for their work, but as it affects the process. Appropriately,  began with long distance phone calls and via the internet.

is open to the possibility of using multiple sites in one city, perhaps including graveyards, theaters and industrial spaces. The virtual world is likely be a part of the project.