Victor & Maria
Based in Bedford, United Kingdom
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We are Victor and Maria, a husband & wife team with more than 10 years of experience working together. Our artistic career started very early in life. Since we met each other in the University of Seville while studying Fine Arts, we have learnt and worked together in different cities and countries. After studying for a year at De Montfort University in Leicester and Universidade de Lisboa, and while studying at the faculty of Fine Arts in Cuenca, we decided to get into the audiovisual world, completing our Photography studies with Honors.
We took our first steps into the audiovisual world creating amateur short-films with family and friends. Soon we started to enjoy filming weddings and other events in Spain (surprise video presents for birthdays and anniversaries, sports, festivals, trips...)
Since we moved to the United Kingdom, we have been lucky enough to film in beautiful places like the Yorkshire countryside, the coast of Lancashire, the Lake District, the highlands of Scotland, the festivals of Bedfordshire, the great city of London... We both love to combine our two passions: filming and travelling. So, we have also been able to capture fantastic images in different countries around the globe.
Why oologists?
Oology is the study of eggs. Eggs are fascinating. The egg, an object that lets things out, but not in, is a creator of realities. The shell, by existing, creates a barrier or border that, in turn, creates two worlds: the outside world (our reality) stays separated from the inside world (our forbidden reality).
For ancient people of India, Egypt, Greece, and Phoenicia, the world was formed from a cosmic egg. The Greeks and Romans of the ancient world placed eggs in tombs as a sign of life after death. In 17th-century France, a bride would break an egg to ensure fertility. Women of the indigenous Japanese Ainu people would mix eggs with the seeds that were to be planted that year. Native Americans treated some illnesses by rubbing an unbroken egg on the skin to absorb the heat and then bury it in a stream.
In art, Salvador Dalí links the egg to pre-natal images and the intra-uterine world. We can see an egg in Piero della Francesca’s Brera Madonna, in Leonardo da Vinci’s Leda and the Swan, in Hieronymus Bosch’s Concert in the Egg, in Rene Magritte’s La Clairvoyance, in Jeff Koons’s Cracked Egg, in Anish Kapoor’s Ishi’s Light…
As filmmakers, we are intrigued by the quality of an egg as a symbol, as proof of different realities and as a creator of life. So, why are we audiovisual oologists? How could we not be?
