Imagine a tent as terrifying and serene as a volcano or as tender and soft as a blanket. Artists Lorena Molina and Sindhu Thirumalaisamy realize such poetic visions in two newly revealed installations for the 2025 Tent Series organized by Alison Weaver, Suzanne Deal Booth Executive Director, and Frauke V. Josenhans, Curator, at the Moody Center for the Arts. Inaugurated in 2021, the Tent Series was established to initiate thought-provoking dialogue across the student body at Rice University. Each fall semester, selected artists are invited to treat one of the three Provisional Campus Facility Tents (hereafter PCF) as their canvas.
Equally compelling in visual presentation, both Molina and Thirumalaisamy thoughtfully consider the layers of engagement and meaning that derive from site-specific, public artworks. Tents, more broadly, as material and spatial objects, serve as a point of departure for the artists to channel questions of belonging in place. If we consider the tent as an expression of symbolic structural space, rather than just flexible walls sustained and stretched by poles, it may represent dispossession, practices of forced or exigent self-housing, or even the sovereignty of anti-urbanism.
Lorena Molina, “La Tierra Recuerda (The Land Remembers),” 2024. Tent Series, commissioned by the Moody Center for the Arts. Photo: Gustavo Raskosky
Molina’s installation comprises a single photograph of lava rock with overlaid text. Emerging like a mirage through the plunging live oak tree branches on the Rice University Campus, the electric yellow words “LA TIERRA RECUERDA” (“the Earth remembers”) peak through the tangles of late summer leaves. The background is composed of compacted rock and rubble, transforming the tent’s facade into that of a volcanic terrain. Simple and direct, the overall graphic design recalls the sharp, attention-grabbing nature of political slogans or the provocative messaging of a protest banner. The jagged landscape featured on the tent’s exterior depicts El Playón, a lava field 25 miles northwest of El Salvador’s capital, formed following an eruption of the San Salvador volcano around 1658. El Playón also holds cultural significance as a site of trauma and violence. During the Salvadoran Civil War (1980-1992), paramilitary death squads abducted, tortured, and murdered innocent civilians. Their bodies still lie, cruelly abandoned, among the rocky crags of El Playón.
In describing a performance from 2018, in which Molina laid upon the bare rock of El Playón, partially covered with dirt and ash, she details the connection of the land with generational pain and collective memory:
The dirt is fertile with the trauma of our history. I wanted my body to reabsorb the pain of the space. I wanted to feel where the bodies of mi gente were laid to rest. I wanted to be physically marked by the past of my family that I can’t escape.*
La Tierra Recuerda is as much a call as it is a cry. The installation draws upon the monumental scale of the PCF tent to create a temporary memorial with a call to action — “remember.” Molina reminds us of the solace that ecological wisdom may offer. The words urge the contemplation of land as witness; as a memory-bearer of the forgotten. The tent becomes a vessel of remembrance, carrying memory that tethers the past to the present. Spaces of memory like this one cultivated by Molina, are often compared to portals, with the power to transport us to distant (or not-so-distant) places and histories. La Tierra Recuerda is not just a reflection on the past. The installation functions as a way to make the unknown known, raising awareness of the tragedies at El Playón and the interference of the United States government in the Civil War — information that remains largely censored from historical narrative and public knowledge. Molina’s work attests that memory, of the body and land, can be medicine for social apathy.
Thirumalaisamy’s projected video installation, entitled provision, considers the tent as a cultural and architectural form that can promote community-gathering and sustenance. The video plays daily from sunset to sunrise and explores the thematic ties between structure, narrative, and the body.
Sindhu Thirumalaisamy, “provision,” 2024. Tent Series, commissioned by the Moody Center for the Arts. Photo: Gustavo Raskosky
provision is an act of radical observation; it offers a sense of intimacy, despite its large, imposing projection. Black vinyl stitches outline the tent’s contours, creating a threaded border that encourages the idea of tent as textile. The video opens with glimpses of grass, illuminated by a gently sweeping light. Singular, isolated, and enlarged images of grasses, fabrics, hands, and shadows drift rhythmically from scene to scene like a quiet, hypnotic dream. Next, a blue tarp, shimmery and reflective as the surface of a river, stretches toward the viewer. As it floats down upon the grass, a hand smooths the imprinted creases and folds. Variously colored fabrics appear in succession, layering one on top of the next, creating a landscape of new surface textures. A richly embroidered rug flows across the PCF tent. Then, more graphic fabrics, printed in lively colors, float with fluid animation as if performing a disembodied dance. Scenes of gathering follow in sequence: the legs of a lawn chair press onto a yellow tarp; shadows of gestural hands suggest conversation; two hands carefully construct a kite together. Finally, the kite is shown in motion, soaring across the very buildings that frame the Rice campus. It is at this moment that the tent’s surface seamlessly dissolves into the surrounding environment. Returning to images of the grass, the video fades to darkness.
Sindhu Thirumalaisamy, “provision,” 2024. Tent Series, commissioned by the Moody Center for the Arts. Photo: Gustavo Raskosky
In this collection of “visionary moments”** of people relaxing, laboring, building, and playing together, Thirumalaisamy expertly interweaves themes of play, softness, and communality. The abundance of textiles in provision work to envision softness as a new visual lexicon to speculate on “the power that softness provides in the context of structural rigidity.”** provision thus asks us to reconsider the ways in which adaptability, pliability, and the ephemeral can inform notions of provisional place making.
With these installations, Molina and Thirumalaisamy offer us tools for reworlding. These works inhabit an ecologically-charged dimension, offering a way of being that recognizes the equal importance of solidified lava and blades of grass to the tallest skyscraper. As we have seen, these works are daring and exercise the artist’s ability to provoke. Following this theme, rather than offer any easy concluding statements, I would like to pose a few questions to the reader. What can we learn from the materiality and form of the humble tent? From the elasticity of cloth — or the porosity of lava rock? How can we resurrect, revise, and resew life-ways in which the poetic and political coexist?
*Lorena Molina, “El Playon,” 2018, https://www.lorenamolina.com/projects/6702692
**“Tent Series: Lorena Molina and Sindhu Thirumalaisamy,” Moody Center for the Arts, accessed September 9, 2024, https://moody.rice.edu/exhibitions/tent-series-lorena-molina-and-sindhu-thirumalaisamy
The 2025 Tent Series will be on view through July 31, 2025 and are located on the Rice University Campus on Loop Road across from Herring Hall.
