Las Sabinas

We are two artists, Sabina Gámez and Sabina Rak, currently based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal working under the name Las Sabinas. 

(email: lasabinas.gr@gmail.com) 

You can watch Sabina Gámez talk about the project as part of the colloquium Thinking Allowed: Social Justice, Migration, and the Environment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkYVqFlb5B8&t=1231s 

Las Sabinas Artist Statement and the project Sabinar

"Once upon a time, there were the Sabina women,
whose fight turned into stories,
which turned into myths,
which turned into movies,
which turned into artworks,
which turned into performances,
which turned into a chance meeting,
which led to a re-invasion of history.
A reason to join forces, bodies, art practices.”

Our collaboration developed through a chance meeting, and a common obsession with the theme of the Rape of the Sabine Women throughout art history. The exploration of this theme has led us in various directions, passing from feminist art to ecological considerations, to questions of what it means to have and create a community, all related to our explorations of materials that range from the virtual realm to the raw matter of the earth.

We each, individually, had been obsessed with Jacques-Louis David’s painting El rapto de las Sabinas. It was not until we got together and evaluated all the different art expressions of the myth that we realized this is the only version where the Sabinas (at least some of them) are fighting, taking control, and taking a stand with their bodies in the battle.

Conquest, abduction, and colonization... are violent terms that are tied to Sabina’s history. But we are not making art about what happened in the 10th century BC; we are taking on a myth that has persisted in art and is embodying history in the now. By putting ourselves into the painting, we are trying to read between the perpetuated images. 

Our project has different shades of humour and layers, many attempts at understanding one’s place. We intervene in the myth, decontextualizing and recontextualizing it to fit our own bodies. The ensuing pieces mix and collage meanings and overlap questions in a physical and historical space.

We took the painting to be our theatre background. And so our collaboration became a play: play came before meaning, as the modus operandi of the conversation between two bodies, as the parameters of the exchanges.

In play, one also strengthens social bonds. Working as Las Sabinas has made us feel stronger together. In our collaboration, we each planted ideas to play with, but we grew them and nourished them together. There were laughs, moments of doubt, trust, challenges, juggling words, searching dictionaries for translations and synonyms, leaning into similarities and differences, and having fun in thinking together.

Maybe all this is about the action of Sabinar: finding one’s people across frontiers.