The filmmaker's grandfather (whom she never met) worked as a longshoreman on the Brooklyn waterfront for 37 years. This film is an attempt to measure closeness despite temporal distance.
Boundary Exercise… positions land surveys, surveying instruments and plat maps as tools of a Western colonial agenda that helped establish and maintain the power dynamics of white supremacy. Evolving from this conceptual foundation, this film thinks through the ways that plant life can provide liberatory models for how our bodies might also subvert these structures of power and control. The film utilizes 264 feet—7 minutes and 20 seconds—of 16mm film, which is the distance of the perimeter of a square chain (a surveying measurement). I buried distances of the film along the property boundary lines of former plantation land in Alabama that is deeply connected to my family, inviting a reciprocal and collaborative relationship with the material itself.
Tabula Rasa is an exploration of space both on and off the screen. As a rhythmic composition of silent white surfaces, mumbling pine trees, humming motors, babbling crows and unsettling rain in the desert, it questions the current state of its own media, but at the same time portrays a location: Smith’s Ranch Drive-in Theater, Twentynine Palms, California
