Ten years ago, Sandra Raes emerged for the first time in the Belgian performing arts scene, we met and we have stayed together ever since.

Sandra Raes was a character, a persona created by Serbian conceptual artist and philosopher Sara Oklobdzija. She, the persona emerges as a response to the experience of dual identity and the conditions of creating as a displaced artist.

Raes began to operate as a curator, booker, developer, mediator, and sometimes producer of Sara Oklobdzija’s artistic work and identity. Through her, the boundaries between artist and curator, author and representative, fiction and professional reality became deliberately blurred.

The experience  of being called “Raes” generated its own body of knowledge, encounters, documents, and stories. Over time, the persona became more than a name. It became a way of questioning how an artistic identity is constructed, performed, negotiated, and maintained—particularly when the artist is displaced from the context in which that identity was formed.

A file accumulated around Raes: traces of this process, collected materials, correspondence, encounters, and fragments of knowledge. Sara eventually moved from this material into a living artistic practice and numerous projects.

Born as the story of a fictional character, Raes developed into an artistic experiment around identity and the infrastructures through which an artist becomes visible, documented, and present—within the archives of a field, and within the memory of its institutions.

These are some of their stories.