Traveling in Alentejo, Portugal, I was deeply struck by the strong resemblance of that landscape to the region of California where I grew up.

I was surprised to feel such a strong emotional resonance to a place so far from my actual home in terms of both geography and time; my corner of the San Francisco bay area has been developed to the point that my grandparents (who have lived in the area for over 70 years) don’t even recognize familiar streets.

I asked my grandparents to remember the old road that they used to take to go to San Francisco, before concrete super-highways skipped over small towns, and, in accordance with the research methods of physical geography, designated this road as a transect along which to gather data in the form of drawings. In order to randomly determine where to draw, I played a game of cribbage with my grandfather and used the points that I gained in each hand as distance intervals between which to stop and draw along the length of the road. I used these same intervals along a road in Alentejo. 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.

The project California - Alentejo was originally created within the context of the Festival Escrita na Paisagem 2007 (Written in the Landscape), a festival of performance art in Alentejo, Portugal, and was originally Inspired by a road trip that the artist took with Inês Barreiros through the Alentejo landscape in 2004. As curator of "Andamentos" (a section of the festival dedicated to young artists/performances), Inês Barreiros included and helped produce California - Alentejo.

The artist would like to acknowledge Inês for her invaluable creative and logistical support. The project would not have been possible without the generosity and help of she and her entire family, Leonilde, José, and Ana Barreiros.

Alyssa would also like to thank Azul Ceballos, Valter Ventura and José Alberto Ferreira for their indispensable help in making this project a reality. 

A special photo credit and thankful hug to my father, John Casey, for the image of the oak tree in California.

California – Alentejo was created with a grant from the US Embassy of Portugal, Department of Cultural Affairs.