Sarah Rara

Aldo Chaparro Studio presents Sarah Rara's Marathon Screenings on October 14, 2021: Lavender House (2021), 4k color video with sound, duration 24:08.

Lavender House explores housing justice within the cultural landscape of Los Angeles, through the lens of a female tenant and her evolving relationship to the empty house next door, a rent-controlled building left uninhabited for six years, held from the market by real estate investors.

Lavender House delivers an embodied history of the tenant-landlord relationship, anxiety, motherhood, and resilience. Lavender House is part auto-fiction, memoir, and psychological thriller.

Lavender House is narrated in English by LA-based artist Nour Mobark, and in Spanish by LA-based musician San Cha. Sound by Luke Fischbeck. Spanish translation by Blanca S. Villalobos.

Sarah Rara is an artist based in Los Angeles and Western Massachusetts working with film, video, sound, and performance. She is a primary organizer of the ongoing project Lucky Dragons. Her work, solo and in collaboration, has been presented at such institutions as the Whitney Museum of American Art (as part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial), the Hammer Museum, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, London’s Institute for Contemporary Art, PS1 in New York, REDCAT and Human Resources in Los Angeles, MOCA Los Angeles, the 54th Venice Biennale, Documenta 14 in Athens, and the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, among others. Rara is a 2018 recipient of the LACMA Art + Technology fellowship. Rara is Assistant Professor of Moving Image at Williams College.

Notes on Lavender House (2021):

Eight years ago, I began recording accounts of every interaction I had with landlords and developers, compiling a substantial multi-volume binder of photographs, notes, documents. I never intended for these notes to form the basis of an artwork, I was collecting evidence to protect myself and fellow tenants from illegal evictions. But after years of observing and documenting, I began adding poems to the binder as a way of processing, as a kind of power reversal. The work poured out of me in the form of a video essay entitled Lavender House, orbiting the tenant-landlord relationship, a minor history of rent control, and the violence of real estate speculation and gentrification in Los Angeles. Lavender House embodies precarity, vulnerability, loss—but also the solidarity, resistance, agility, and resilience of tenants who are the heroes of this narrative.

* TACTICS: Digging holes: taking stock of the moment of digging oneself into a hole (or occupying a hole that’s been inherited) without trying to get out for a moment. sensing the problem, the impulse, the discomfort, the situation, drawing the contours of this particular hole. What is the quality of experience in the present state of digging a hole, so to speak. Where is language and where is the mind in that state? *

— Sarah Rara, July 2021