Niña En Barco, is a sensory film portrait of women navigating within the corporeal, familial, and architectural structures and confines of their home, engaging in repetitive daily routine and intimate care of the body. Deep in the house, away from natural light, illumination is soft and fuzzy and bodies blend into their surroundings and each other. Near and distant sounds shape the permeable atmosphere and spatiality of the world the film builds within.

We start from an interior place, the body our first and primary architecture - a state of liminal tension with being, itself and its environment. Though we start from this interior place our bodies do not end with the skin - a sharp intake of air, a question mark we inhabit - we are woven into the spaces within which we reside and operate. Infused with subjectivity, space around is intimate and corporeal, body and person navigate among thresholds, boundaries and liminalities there-within. We are embedded in a relational field, which we change and which changes us through encounters.

The experience of being is intimate, yet simultaneously distant. Embedded in an existence we cannot concretely explain nor mark the beginning and end of - our sense of self can become dissociated. The body seizes. Emotions likewise can be seen to tighten and close inward, and the energetic presence of both person and space become small and tight. This is countered by an unfolding - a redeployment of mind, body and spirit. The camera is drawn close into the layers of this world. It does not sustain focus and frequently becomes stuck, flexing and fluctuating between near and distant points as it efforts to travel through.

10 minutes 24 seconds

The Boston Common is a layered and conflicted site. A symbol of the complex (and potentially unattainable) project of pursuing freedom for all.

There has never been an achieved or completed project of freedom for all, and there has never been a non-conflicted or non-contradictory (Boston) Common. An idea of common is inherently exclusionary and thus to be truthful must function as a perpetual site of unearthing and revealing the contradictions of what is in common and what is freedom.

The Great Elm tree stood on the Boston Common for 250 years, growing to span over 100 feet in diameter. The tree was used for many years for public hangings, including the well known case of Mary Dyer who lost her life for being Quaker in the Puritan Colony. The tree was later glorified and personified publicly as Boston’s “oldest living inhabitant”, and as a “Beloved Citizen. Amongst current statues and monuments in the Common, the site where the Great Elm stood is now empty.

Why is the tree absent now?

What is an appropriate way to conjure its presence, or to respond in the site?

Under the title Beloved Citizen, we propose the installation of an Elm sapling, approximately 10 foot tall, on the site where the Great Elm stood. This sapling would be planted and then unplanted a year later to be replaced by another. This replacement would occur annually, integrating into its action a ritual in which the removed tree is given to an individual or group to take out of the site and plant elsewhere.     

Our use of the title Beloved Citizen refers to two meanings; the right of all people to be beloved and to belong, and the existence of many experiences of rejection and being cast out unjustly, either through exile or loss of life. The word citizen has two definitions, legally recognized member of a nation state, or inhabitant of a region. We refer to the latter.

The bodies of people hung on the Great Elm, including those whose lives were taken unjustly, were buried in the Common in unmarked graves; their location within the site is unknown. 

When a hole is dug for the elm sapling, their bodies are conjured and unearthed. When the tree grows, they are honored in their role of giving nutrient-life to the tree, which nurtures new sentiments and relation to history. 

The careful steps required for transplanting a tree form the basis of a task based community ritual. 

The root system of the tree must be measured, and the root ball gently excavated. The tree lifted and separated from the site, is then wrapped in burlap, tied, and placed in a container to protect and secure it for travel. A new young sapling is then planted in the same hole in the site, the burlap cut to release its roots, and soil carefully packed in around. When this tree has been settled and the tasks in the site are complete, the group will travel to the new site and repeat the process of planting together. The form of this processional will reflect the mindful collective quality of the unplanting, and will be designed annually in response to the distance and nature of the destination site.

Each basic action in this process can be refined and transformed to deepen its meaning. The order and direction in which the burlap cloth is folded, moving counterclockwise, corner by corner. The string continuing this trajectory, as it travels from the neck to the base of each face of the root ball, slowly forming an intricate knotted pattern. Gathered people perform these actions together, each taking a role which is carried out in a mutual choreography.

Each year people in Massachusetts will be invited to submit letters and videos, sharing personal connection to the subject of the Beloved Citizen, in the context of discrimination, harm or displacement, and expressing interest in becoming caretaker and guardian of the sapling. We will actively reach out to classrooms, activists and community organizations to build awareness of the project and invite submissions. These voices form a new public layer of the project, a continuous rearticulation of the relationship between the historic site and contemporary experience. These documents will be permanently housed on a website, along with an image map showing the location of a growing collection of saplings transplanted outside the Common. One name will be drawn each year to determine the group or individual who will receive guardianship of the tree. 

By uprooting the tree, we are not denying the reality of harm, but acknowledging and enacting it through the stress and risk that the  process generates in the body of the tree. Vulnerability and responsibility are palpable when performing the transplant process, and become a point of contemplation.  The distinction lies in the intention and care that are cultivated by collectively carrying out the necessary steps, task becoming social engagement and transformative process.                                  

The project breaks the sanctity of dominant historical ground which has been established in the Common. Staking a new relation to history in the site, revealing freedom and democracy as inherently problematic, and continuously forming. Digging transgresses power and control boundaries of the public site of the common. The site can thus function symbolically and actually to nurture inquiries which unearth present injustices and acknowledge those who have suffered. 

Sujin Lim & Kathryn Abarbanel

6 month installation in Seattle Center, commissioned by the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture.

RATHAUS, German for “city hall,” is also an adaptation of the term used to refer to the site where this project originated. “Rat House” was the name given to a home that was rehabilitated by my company, Abarbanel & Gamboa Design, and the title indicates the condition of the property in its discovered state. The clothing seen in this installation reflects a selection of objects and personal items that were found throughout Rat House—filthy, and about to be thrown away. Through their re-presentation in RATHAUS, I seek to invite contemplation by capitalizing on the power and presence of these evocative-historical objects.

The installation contains a large-scale fabric sculpture, which has been constructed from soiled clothes that collected in the home for over fifty years, exhibiting signifiers of the growth and aging of a family. These garments have been shaped into a chromatic form, which displays a weight, mass, and scale referring to the human body. A companion photographic book offers portraits of individual, life-sized objects, organized chromatically.

RATHAUS draws on the provocative vision of clothing without a body, suggesting the varied tensions emitted by objects displayed without reference to their purpose. An emotional range is articulated through color, and both material and form speak to the absence of the clothing’s wearers: their home, context, and lived experience.

This work is a collaboration with artist, Maria Gamboa. We were interested in how we could alter the engagement with, and function of the window. We fitted a geometric styroform into the frame of one of three windows in a space, and consolidated the view into a central point which one could look through.

Garments are presented as flat images - surfaces with pattern, color, texture and wear. 

Fabric is by nature a fluid material which moves, ripples and bunches. It is cut to form dimensional skins which fit around the curves of our bodies. These garments reference the bodies of their wearers, their acute absence and unknown location and condition. They refuse their flat status, at the same time that they accept it.

The project calls attention to people’s intimate relationship with garments - presentation of the garments invites thoughts of the everyday, the shirt I put on every morning, of memory, the pattern and color I remember on the housedress of my grandmother, of temporality, the growing of the body and the different clothes it requires as our forms age and identities shift, and the ultimate impermanence of our corporeal forms.

The frame of the images is the size of an adult female garment armpit to armpit – the area containing, when worn, the ribs sternum breasts heart lungs.

The garments were photographed from the front and the back. Many garments in the series are made from fabrics which are transparent- the absent body is an apparition which would have shown through.

Records the condition the of ground surrounding one neglected home.

The house is being coated and resurfaced on the inside - paint falls like new snow, producing images of both classical drapery and interstellar landscape.

An ongoing collection of photos of houses where people have written their experiences on the walls. 

Sculptural studies exploring the body and space around it as both positive and negative form. Considering the condition of the body within and pushing out of contained forms and situations.

The malleable body adapts, dents, bends, and is pushed into form within spatial and material containers, and the body produces spatial forms between its own parts in an embrace, using its own force and weight.

 Several hundred blind drawings produced during dance performances and rehearsals over a period of several years, recording gesture, movement and space through line. 

A social laboratory for exploring axis of power, identity and expression through discussion and creation of clothing and other performative projects. 

A two year social collaboration with artist-scientist Sara Perl Egendorf involving social, material and pedagogical experimentation - classes, workshops, brainstorms, performances, clothing and costume production, video and photography projects. 

"Hi, we are social documentarians. We are trying to learn, WHAT IS A LESBIAN DANCE? We would like to collect them. Do you have any you can share with us? Will you teach us? Where did you learn to lesbian dance?"

These questions were met with confusion, resistance, suspicion, openness, debate, and presentation of dances reflecting a wide variety of interpretations on the theme.

Three days of photo, video and interview performance-research at Seattle Pride Celebration 2009. A collaboration with artist Perl Egendorf, with assistance from Tim Warburton and Devona Lang.

Mobile gallery and community space, housed in a winnebago. The Lunch Box curated and presented interior, exterior and traveling exhibitions and performances for six months from its home on the exterior sculpture pad at the Hollins University Eleanor D. Wilson Museum.

2nd Life is a material recycling facility at Rhode Island School of Design which I created as a student. I was frustrated with the quantities of material and goods I saw thrown away at the university, and so created a solution and pushed to implement it.  The center has been running for over 10 years and has grown substantially since my departure from RISD, moving from the shipping container to the storefront location it now occupies in downtown Providence where it serves as recycling facility and gallery for related projects.