I’ve seen a lot of places where people decide to make art happen, and most of them are lying to you about what they are. Di Rosa is different. It’s not lying. 22 acres of Northern California wetlands and this weird, sprawling collection that refuses to behave like a proper museum, it’s got that swampy, uncertain quality where nature keeps asserting itself whether the curators like it or not.
You put a body in that landscape and something shifts. The preserve isn’t backdrop, it’s accomplice. All those reeds and that water reflecting back whatever you bring to it, the way the light changes and suddenly your performance isn’t about you anymore, it’s about what happens when intention meets actual ground, actual mud, actual consequence.
Sophont in Action works because the location does half the heavy lifting. This isn’t white cube bullshit where the space pretends neutrality. Di Rosa’s got history, got personality, got this insistence on California weirdness that makes pretension harder to sustain. You’re performing for the egrets as much as the audience.
What Desirée Holman Sophont in ActionHolman understands is that wisdom isn’t performed at a place, it’s negotiated with it. The preserve makes demands. It’s humid, it’s uncontrolled, it’s got mosquitos probably. You can’t fake your way through that kind of specificity. The body moving through that particular landscape at that particular moment becomes the argument itself.