Abstract

Sabinar is a multimedia installation that explores the relationship between self and environment, bridging physical and virtual realms through 3D volumetric captures, video, animation, and an immersive soundscape. Inspired by my personal experience, the work engages with the transformations triggered by a persistent sense of rootlessness that I have encountered after migrating from Colombia to Canada. Through the metaphor and embodied experience of becoming the Sabina tree (Árbol del Viento), the work reflects on identity, resilience, and the female body’s connection to ancestral roots, displacement, and an ongoing personal metamorphosis. By intertwining my memories with ancestral narratives, this project re-imagines how one inhabits the world, not as a fixed state but as an evolving process shaped by adaptation and reconnection with the environment.

In the exhibition space, the installation includes two (Juniperus phoenicea.T)2 branches, a Canadian relative of the Sabina tree (Juniperus Canariensis).3 This presents a bridge between geographies and identities, an evolving family tree, a connection with the place I inhabit now and the home of La Sabina. Visually and spatially, the installation employs multiple layers, including a translucent screen (Sharkstooth Scrim), animated projections, and dynamic shadows, to construct a dreamlike environment that evokes the sense of being simultaneously present in multiple realities. A large-scale video projection illuminates the suspended screen, the back gallery wall, and the Juniperus branches with its light. This interplay creates ghostly, holographic echoes of Sabina’s metamorphosis: as a woman, as a tree, as an entity, and as a landscape.