California-Alentejo was originally created for the festival of performance art, Escrita na Paisagem (Written in the Landscape) in Evora, Portugal.

Inspired by the theme of the festival, "Games, Travel, and Hospitality", I decided to transform the landscapes of my home in California and Evora into "game boards". As I physically traveled along each "game board", I created drawings with which to compare the two locales.

I asked my grandparents to remember the old road that they used to take to San Francisco before concrete super-highways skipped over small towns. In accordance with the research methods of physical geography, I designated this road as a transect along which to gather data in the form of drawings.

Converting miles into kilometers, I found a similar road in Alentejo, Portugal, that also ran east to west and followed a river delta to a ferry landing.

In order to randomly determine where to draw along the road, I played a game of cribbage with my grandfather and used the points gained in each hand as distance intervals between which to stop and draw along the length of each road.

With this method, I was able to take an "objective" sampling of drawings from the two regions. Recorded in two travel journals, 13 drawings in California correspond to 13 in Alentejo. 

Here are the results: