Usue Arrieta (Arrasate, Gipuzkoa, 1979) and Vicente Vázquez (Tarragona, 1976) met at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cuenca and began collaborating in 2003 under the name weareQQ. They develop a multidisciplinary practice encompassing formats such as video, installation, and public intervention. Nevertheless, they often use the audiovisual medium as a way of redefining social spaces that determine political, ideological, and economic aspects of everyday life. In this sense, they understand their practice as a way of experimenting with the possibilities of the collective and of generating reflections on place and the relationships that unfold within it in today’s world.

Audiovisual production plays a very important—though not exclusive—role in their artistic trajectory, with works such as El enemigo (2010), La boca (2010), Canedo (2010), La Huesera (2011), and the series Oficios preventivos (2005–2006). Alongside the development of their work, which has been shown in solo and group exhibitions, festivals, and film archives both in Spain and abroad, weareQQ have given lectures and workshops at art centers and universities. Until 2013, their projects were strongly linked to territory. Through track cycling (Going in Circles, Seoul Art Space Geumcheon) and mountain cycling (La Vuelta a España as it passes through the Picos de Europa, and more recently the Tour de France), as well as quasi-sporting practices such as goitibehera races and aeromodelling in the Basque Country (Goitik behera, behetik gora as part of X Films at the Punto de Vista Festival 2012), they reflected on the materiality of post-industrial relations of production. Between 2012 and 2013 they worked at Erzberg, an open-pit iron mine in the Austrian Alps, shaping their participation in the exhibition Contra Tapiès. They also prepared a solo exhibition on mass occupations of the Pyrenees, presented at Espai 13 of the Joan Miró Foundation in 2013. In addition, they carried out an exchange with the curatorial office Ribete, which resulted in the exhibition Resonance alongside Faivovich and Goldberg and The Agency at the Goethe Institute Wyoming Building, New York; two video works at 98 Weeks in Beirut; and the text “CA-NE-DON,” published in Territorios y Fronteras, experiencias documentales contemporáneas, edited by the University of the Basque Country (EHU).

As an expansion of their collaborative practice, in 2013 they co-founded Tractora Koop. E., an artists’ cooperative based on the operational model of truck drivers’ cooperatives. In addition to contributing to the conception, production, and distribution of individual artistic projects, Tractora’s activity has expanded to the production of collective projects involving its various members, as a further step in the team’s internal reflection on labor in art, the means of production, the social function, and the praxis of the contemporary artist.

Arrieta and Vázquez use the artistic and cinematic context to make their activity public, which they define as a long-term project whose visible form they consider transitional and transitive. They understand their practice as a way of researching and experimenting with the possibilities of the collective. Their work—whether in film sequences, texts, slide presentations, or other spatio-temporal devices—seeks to reformulate the social.