After bringing her Terceira-born artistic project to the Canary Islands, Sara Brum reflects on the shared landscapes, histories and identities of Atlantic archipelagos—and argues that lasting cultural exchanges require institutional support, financial resources and a willingness to look beyond the boundaries of individual islands.

The ocean has always been an ambiguous presence in islanders’ lives. It separates and connects, isolates and invites, establishes distances while offering pathways toward other shores. For generations, the Atlantic has shaped the geography of Azorean existence, as well as its imagination, its departures, and its encounters with the wider world. For visual artist Sara Brum, born of an artistic relationship with the island of Terceira, the sea is not merely the space between islands. It is a territory of communication, a shared landscape through which distinct communities may discover how much of their histories, experiences and aspirations they hold in common.

That conviction lies at the heart of her recent journey to the Canary Islands, where she presented Aqui Só Pode Viver o Diabo (Only the Devil Can Live Here), an artistic project originally developed on Terceira. Speaking to Diário Insular, Brum described how she built the initiative through her determination to connect with independent cultural spaces in another Macaronesian archipelago. What began with a conversation with a filmmaker led to an introduction to a curator, then to a gallery, and eventually to a series of activities across the three Canary Islands. The resulting program included teacher training, lectures, workshops open to artists, and an exhibition, transforming a project rooted in one island into a broader dialogue about the experience of insularity.

One of the most compelling aspects of Brum’s work is her use of volcanic material as both artistic medium and metaphor. In recent pieces, she has incorporated bagacina, the porous volcanic gravel characteristic of Azorean landscapes, known in the Canary Islands as picón. The material embodies an elemental connection between territories separated by hundreds of miles of ocean. It is the ground upon which communities have built their homes, cultivated their fields and established their identities. For the exhibition in Tenerife, Brum created six new works using local volcanic material, allowing a project conceived in Terceira to acquire a physical relationship with the island hosting it. The artistic gesture suggests that cultural exchange need not erase a place’s particularity; instead, it can reveal how different places speak through a common geological and human language.

Brum identifies numerous affinities among the archipelagos of Macaronesia, the Atlantic region encompassing the Azores, Madeira, the Canary Islands and Cape Verde. Geography and biodiversity are obvious points of connection. Still, she also emphasizes historical experiences, gastronomy, political organization, cultural traditions and the continuing negotiation between regional identity and wider centers of authority. In the Canary Islands, she encountered artists eager to create, traditions capable of adapting to contemporary life, and cultural communities engaged in questions of autonomy and representation. Such similarities, she believes, provide fertile ground for artistic collaboration, particularly when artists explore the symbols and narratives that give island societies their distinctive character.

Yet the experience also revealed a paradox. Despite their geographical and cultural affinities, the Azores and the Canary Islands remain surprisingly unfamiliar to one another. Brum was struck by the limited mutual knowledge she encountered, suggesting that physical proximity within the Atlantic does not automatically translate into cultural awareness. For islands accustomed to directing their attention toward continental capitals and larger cultural centers, relationships with neighboring archipelagos can remain underdeveloped. The result is a missed opportunity to establish networks based not on geographical centrality, but on shared experiences of island life.

It is here that Brum’s reflections acquire a broader institutional significance. She argues that exchanges between Macaronesian artists should not depend exclusively upon individual initiative, occasional invitations or the personal resources of those involved. She maintains that financial assistance and public institutional support are necessary to increase the international visibility of Azorean culture and build relationships that can continue beyond isolated events. She acknowledges that previous collaborations have occurred and that other Azorean cultural figures have helped build such connections. Her concern is that these efforts remain intermittent rather than developing into sustained programs whose effects can be felt over time.

For Brum, cultural openness is essential to artistic vitality. Encountering unfamiliar practices, working with artists from different islands, and questioning established assumptions keep cultural communities from becoming inward-looking or stagnant. The potential extends well beyond exhibitions to educational exchanges, residencies, workshops, collaborative research and the circulation of artistic ideas. Madeira, the Canary Islands, and Cape Verde, she suggests, offer many possibilities, but meaningful cooperation must begin with mutual understanding. Without that foundation, the search for partnerships becomes unnecessarily difficult.

Her ambitions for Aqui Só Pode Viver o Diabo remain open. After taking the project to the Canary Islands and, for a shorter period, to Madeira, she hopes to present it in Cape Verde eventually. Yet she is deliberately unwilling to force that possibility. Cultural collaboration, she argues, requires time, trust and sensitivity to the communities involved. Rushing into unfamiliar territories can reproduce extractive practices in which artists draw inspiration or resources from places without establishing reciprocal relationships. What matters to Brum is not simply extending the geographical reach of her own work, but helping create alliances that allow artists and institutions to learn from one another.

Her reflections speak to a larger question about the international presence of Azorean culture. The islands possess a rich artistic heritage and a contemporary creative community whose work can participate meaningfully in conversations far beyond the archipelago. But cultural visibility cannot depend solely upon occasional individual achievements. It also requires structures that support mobility, translation, exhibition opportunities, professional encounters and continuing partnerships. In that sense, the dialogue Brum advocates across Macaronesia could become part of a wider strategy for connecting Azorean artistic production with audiences and cultural institutions elsewhere.

There is something particularly evocative about an artist carrying the volcanic earth of one island into conversation with the volcanic earth of another. The gesture brings together geology and imagination, territory and identity, memory and contemporary artistic practice. It reminds us that islands are not merely isolated fragments of land surrounded by water. They are places of encounter, capable of recognizing themselves in distant landscapes without surrendering their individuality.

Sara Brum’s experience in the Canary Islands offers a vision of cultural exchange built upon curiosity, reciprocity and permanence. Her work begins with the particular experience of Terceira. Still, it reaches toward a larger Atlantic community, one in which artists can establish relationships across the boundaries of language, geography and political administration.

And perhaps the most important lesson of her journey is also the simplest: the Atlantic need not be understood as the distance separating island cultures. It can become the space where they meet, recognize one another, and imagine new possibilities together.

For islands that have spent centuries looking toward distant continents, there may be an equally important future in learning to look toward one another.

Based on an interview in Diário Insular-José Lourenço-director. The photos are also from DI.