Susan Kleinberg’s Tierra Sin Males is an animation built out of contradiction: a digitally generated glass sphere rolling with impossible tension, and a soundtrack pulled entirely from the real world. The image is synthetic; the resonance is bodily. That pairing is deliberate. Her mentor John Cage taught her that every organ vibrates at its own frequency, and the piece carries that insight forward – equilibrium and disequilibrium held in the same frame.
At the center of the orbit is an image people mistake for ancient art – a fragment of Attic pottery, an Etruscan mask, a calligraphic ruin. In truth, it is the reflection of a highway sign on the U.S.–Mexico border: a silhouette of a family running, the word Caution flashing beside them. For years she carried that image, waiting for the structure that could hold its ethical weight. Tierra Sin Males became that structure.
The title gestures towards the “land without evil,” a concept she encountered through Nobel laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel. For Kleinberg, it isn’t a promise but a tension: What do we run from? What do we run toward? In her hands, the question becomes a kinetic condition – utopia and danger pulled into the same arc, always slightly off balance, yet searching for coherence.
This interview captures the rigor behind her practice: the way authenticity emerges not from confession but from precision, from the courage to bind political urgency, historical memory, and personal resonance into one unified, unsettling form.
