Jimena Sarno engages craft traditions to imagine a future built on values of collectivity, reconfiguration, and repair. For Rhapsody, the title of the exhibition and the installation at its core, Sarno collaborated with artists and makers from the Global South, combining filmmaking, sound, and sculpture with contemporary and traditional craft practices. Within a global context of extreme violence, fragmentation, and destruction, the artists share time, space, and resources to deepen solidarity through making, repairing, and the collective production of alternative forms of knowledge. Sarno’s project is framed as an alternative to Modernism’s utilization of cultural production as a tool to imagine utopian futures while reinforcing global systems of coloniality. The central installation features a group of objects made using techniques — including weaving, felting, woodworking, and pottery — that rely on bodies of knowledge passed from maker to maker. These objects are tools — at once utilitarian and utopian — designed for a hoped-for, not-so-distant future built on solidarity and mutual care.

This assemblage of domestically-scaled, speculative tools made by more than a dozen artists underscores the significance of interdependence and collectivity. Displayed on rolling tables, these objects cast shadows across a 100-foot-long film projection that interlaces footage of Sarno learning to weave and the landscapes that were the backdrop to her process. Sarno traveled to Perú and Argentina (where she was born) to study weaving within the context of Andean cosmology and tradition, in which textiles are bearers of information. Sarno notes, “The loom functions as a narrative space, and weaving as a metaphor for the interconnectedness of all beings. For Rhapsody, I have transposed this generative space into a monumental projection, in which film montage echoes the weaving process.” Sarno’s film is accompanied by changing soundscapes composed by collaborators including Dirar Kalash and Mhamad Safa.

The exhibition brings together 3 additional works, including a textile and text library, along with two installations incorporating film, sound and sculpture. A Life in the Forest is gradually built with the accumulation of objects restored in repair workshops. Las Tres Gracias interrogates imperialism and the myth of democracy through creation legends and Third World poetry. The exhibition title references the multiple definitions of a rhapsody, including the musical composition characterized by improvisation as well as the epic poem and its Greek root, rhapsode, meaning someone who stitches or sews songs together. The collaborations and ongoing reconfigurations of Sarno’s installation, including the addition of new works over the course of the exhibition, contribute to the rhapsodic sense of weaving together changing elements, which will remain in flux, mobile and uncertain. The contributions by Sarno, her collaborators, and community members emphasize our shared responsibility for repairing a broken down present as we defend our future. 

About the Artist:
Jimena Sarno is an interdisciplinary artist and educator born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and based in Los Angeles. With a focus on the sensorial and affective experiences shaped by political subjecthood, she works across a range of media including installation, sound, video, text, and sculpture. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at MASS MoCA (Kissing through a Curtain, 2020); REDCAT, Los Angeles; Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park, California; Clockshop, Los Angeles; 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica; LACE, Los Angeles; Visitor Welcome Center, Los Angeles; Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, California; Mistake Room, Los Angeles; Human Resources, Los Angeles; PØST, Los Angeles; UCI Contemporary Art Center, Irvine, California; Grand Central Art Center, Santa Ana, California; Control Room, Los Angeles; San Diego Art Institute; Luminary, St. Louis, Missouri; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea de Santiago De Compostela, Spain; among others. Her work has been supported by the California Arts Council Individual Fellowship, the California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists, the Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant, and she is 2023–24 Lucas Artist Fellow in Visual Arts at Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga, California.

Jimena Sarno, Rhapsody, 2025, film still, Color 16 mm and Super 8 film transferred to video, with audio.