Vivian’s Garden

Vivian Suter and her mother Elisabeth Wild are Swiss-Austrian artists who live together in Panajachel, Guatemala, on a former coffee farm they bought in the 1980s. Their lush tropical garden includes studios where they work, and is shared with their dogs and other tenants, Mayans who help guard them. Elisabeth, who is over ninety years old, and Vivian, sixty, embody a family dynamic in which the roles of mother and daughter are interchangeable. Rosalind Nashashibi’s 16mm camera enters symbiosis with the lives of the women through close, sometimes furtive shots which capture the intimacy of a secluded, secret place: a look at the everyday life of two artists living in harmony far from their own country.