sweet auburn | 2025 volume I
Cara Giaimo and Lilia Kilburn are a wife-andwife artist team. Their recent work has appeared in venues such as the ICA Boston First Fridays, the Harvard Film Archive, Fabrikzeitung Magazine, the South Street Seaport Museum, and the New York Times. Lilia is a fellow at the Film Study Center at Harvard, where she also teaches courses in anthropology and filmmaking. Cara is a science and nature journalist whose second book, Atlas Obscura: Wild Life( 2024), is a thoughtful collection of cool species, ecosystem dynamics, and other wonders of the living world. She also writes music and plays guitar for the band sidebody.
“ Love in the Landscape”
Cara and Lilia will create a short film that focuses on different kinds of love stories found in the Mount Auburn landscape. The film will explore the ways that human and nonhuman creatures sustain one another, asking: How can we read signs of human love in the Cemetery’ s stones, monuments, and gardens? What might we be able to say about how Mount Auburn’ s nonhuman residents experience such things as care, affection, and love? By attending closely to these findings at Mount Auburn, Cara and Lilia hope to learn something about the conditions necessary to sustain life and love, and the role of spaces like Mount Auburn in doing so.
Lia Pikus is a cellist and composer whose practice centers on art’ s ability to cultivate experiences of presence and connection. As a Thomas J. Watson fellow( 2023), she researched this connective power on a global scale, exploring the role of art in fostering community around the world. This research formed the foundation for her current explorations in live looping as a form of meditative ritual. It is also the central focus of her debut EP, Ritual, released in 2024. Lia was an Artist-in-Residence at Shenandoah National Park in 2024 and at Mothership NYC in 2023. She is currently pursuing a Masters in Religion, Ethics, and Politics at Harvard University. www. liapikus. com
“ Deep Listening as Ritual”
Lia believes that without ritual we lose not only a structured way to process grief but also a deeper connection to our internal world and to love itself. This project seeks to address that absence by using music as a form of ritual. Throughout her residency, Lia will lead a series of outdoor sonic rituals( a. k. a Grief Meditations) with her cello, designed to create a space for attuning to grief, impermanence, connection, and love. Lia will conclude her residency with an outdoor concert comprising original compositions inspired by her own reflections on grief and ritual.
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