Living in Sanctuary: A Photography Exhibit on Searching for Refuge in Sacred Locations

Baxter St on the Camera Club of New York is a pictures gallery on Ludlow Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Founded in 1884, it’s certainly one of many unassuming, principally unpopulated, artwork galleries scattered throughout decrease Manhattan. I walked by way of the door throughout a Friday golden hour in June. There have been two docents staffing the small gallery. Other than the 2 caretakers, the one different determine occupying the house was a truncated church pew sitting within the middle of the exhibit, ushering the viewer right into a synecdoche of a church sanctuary.

Cinthya Santos Briones, the anthropologist, ethnographer and artist behind the gallery exhibit “Living in Sanctuary,” captures the anomaly of residing in a literal sanctuary. For refugees and immigrants spending from 4 months to 4 years in sanctuary, the church that shelters them is a sanctuary — a sacred house — a protected haven and a jail cell. “It’s like a VIP jail,” Santos Briones instructed me in a Zoom name.

Santos Briones is a local of Mexico, the place she studied anthropology and labored as an ethnographer and photojournalist.

Her husband, Rev. Juan Carlos Ruiz, who’s featured within the exhibit, co-founded the New Sanctuary Movement 20 years in the past in New York City, in response to the creation of the Unites States Immigration Customs and Enforcement workplace. Ruiz is the pastor of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Bayridge, Brooklyn.

Although a pastor’s spouse — and the coed of a Jesuit mentor, Alfredo Zepeda González, SJ — Santos Briones describes herself as not a deeply non secular particular person. Her work is infused with reverence, nevertheless, for the human particular person in its focus. Her pictures is a “gesture of care,” that unites the creator, the viewer and the topic — her co-author — somewhat than an objectifying or distancing gaze.

Elements of Ignatian creativeness might be felt throughout the gallery. The ornately carved choir stall the place a footsore New Yorker can soak up the pictures round her got here from the Church of the Good Shepherd. Its presence is a device to help in contemplation — it composes the place the pictures ponder round us. We are written into visible tales that our eyes soak up hanging on the wall.

Immigrants looking for shelter at Ruiz’s congregation in Brooklyn are featured within the exhibit alongside immigrants looking for haven in church buildings in Boulder, Colorado; New Haven, Connecticut; and New Mexico. Many of the pictures date from the primary Trump administration, from 2017 to 2019, and there are additionally a couple of more moderen portraits from 2025.

“Living in Sanctuary” is an intimate invitation to dwell with our fellow people who search security in a tabernacle and the ambiguous position that the home of worship performs for an immigrant looking for protected haven and craving for freedom of motion and new life.

Imagination

The resiliency of creativeness and the brand new avenues they open are on the coronary heart of Santos Briones’ “Living in Sanctuary” undertaking. Imagination is a vital device for the immigrant, a counter-imagination to the nationalistic and political imaginations that kind borders. Just as a border is a actuality created by way of the imagination of political forces, immigration is a actuality constructed from an imagining grounded in hope, as Javier Serrano, an immigration scholar, wrote. The immigrant imagines future potentialities for herself and for her household past the boundaries of their present lives.

Santos Briones’ work honors the creativeness it takes to rework “precarious spaces,” right into a “re-enactment of home.”

Santos Briones’ pictures seize the materiality of residing in deserted workplace areas, damp basements, rooms created with pipe-and-drape in century-old church buildings. They are sensory experiences — the creature comforts of residence piled up on an workplace desk — a toy or makeshift kitchen interrupting gothic structure. The juxtaposition between the human and the sacred creates a rigidity all through these pictures. These could also be sanctuaries, however they don’t seem to be environments for human residing. Sometimes there aren’t any showers in these church buildings, Santos Briones identified.

In “The Room,” a stuffed Pokémon character sits on a mattress beneath an workplace door whose window has been papered over. The harsh fluorescent lighting is a tough edge that the gentle mattress and stuffed determine attempt to soften. A room is a room is a room, however the {photograph} conjures up the stress between the light nourishing house for a kid’s bed room and the laborious, utilitarian world of enterprise convention rooms. In different pictures, church rectories and kitchens are festooned in balloons and tinsel for birthday events and household celebrations.

“They transform these places,” Santos Briones mentioned.

One refugee, “Khadim,” who took shelter at a church in New Mexico, exercised his creativeness by protecting a basement window with {a photograph} of a light-filled forest. Numerous research have proven that the human immune system might be strengthened after spending time within the woods. Studies have demonstrated that psychological wellness indicators go up and stress goes down even after merely taking a look at pictures of timber. The window supplies a portal of creativeness, a window into the disposition on immigrant — hoping in opposition to hope — that actually lightens a basement residence.

“He was a really melancholic person,” Santos Briones recalled of her topic, who not too long ago handed away.

Advocacy

Santos Briones mentioned that her work was about connecting the present disaster within the streets with long-standing U.S. immigration coverage, which she describes as an antagonist of this hope-filled, resourceful imagining.

“A lot of my work is with children,” Santos Briones mentioned, “What the state is doing is tearing the imagination of these children apart.” The present state of immigration coverage — with a surge in detentions, mass deportations of contested legality, and doubling the use of remote monitoring through ankle displays and smartphone apps — has sparked mass outrage. “They’re trying to make it uncomfortable and get people to leave,” Fr. Brian Strassburger, SJ, of Del Camino Jesuit Border Ministries said in a January Zoom panel.

“Living in Sanctuary” is an intimate invitation to dwell with our fellow people who search security in a tabernacle and the ambiguous position that the home of worship performs for an immigrant looking for protected haven and craving for freedom of motion and new life.

Santos Briones described the present insurance policies as a “war against children.” She describes the pictures exterior of the gallery that fill the information: “Children in detention centers, children being taken from their families from ICE agents.” Reports present that greater than 400,000 youngsters have appeared in immigration court docket and not using a lawyer. And deportations and detention insurance policies have separated more than 145,000 children from their dad and mom. “They are tearing apart the imagination of the future of children,” she mentioned.

Children are political actors within the immigration course of, Santos Briones mentioned. Immigration has typically stolen childhood from youngsters: Children accompany their dad and mom to immigration hearings, function translators for his or her dad and mom and attend conferences with attorneys. Part of her objective of portraying youngsters in sanctuary was to indicate their company another way.

In “La gravedad del juego,” a younger boy performs soccer (soccer) in a darkened church. The sport persists, with unimaginable seriousness even in darkish circumstances — his life, his childhood, depend on it.

Santos Briones made an effort to spotlight the voices of youngsters within the undertaking. She included polaroids with youngsters’s drawings of residence and their reflections on residence, immigration and church sanctuary. She invited migrants and ministers to share their experiences of crossing the borders, making an train of immigrant creativeness in response to the nationalistic creativeness, and to share their experiences of turning a non-home — this sanctuary church — into their residence.

“Your home is not here, your roots are not here,” Santos Briones noticed of the contradictions of the immigrant expertise, “but the idea of home is present all the time.”

Santos Briones, as a participatory artist and skilled ethnographer, stays delicate to the colonial energy dynamics underlying sanctuary. The immigrants looking for security in sanctuaries are sometimes powerless, with out the paperwork that make them political individuals on this nation. The church buildings that provide them shelter, the volunteers who convey meals, who assist provide refuge, are sometimes led by white Europeans.

“There’s lots of romanticization of the movement that does not discuss the patriarchal and colonial aspects of the movement,” Santos Briones shared.

Sacramentality

Santos Briones described her work as documentary and participatory, drawing the topics of the {photograph} into the method of journaling their very own expertise of sanctuary. Aesthetically, she mentioned, she was drawn towards the standard of sunshine within the church areas, noting that God is usually symbolized as a ray of sunshine. Light is a component that means the divine to our imaginations.

Santos Briones’ work honors the creativeness it takes to rework “precarious spaces,” right into a “re-enactment of home.”

Although the sanctuaries might be jail cells, they’re, for many immigrants, transitory dwellings. The hushed mild of the sanctuary, stained glass daylight filtered on gray stone partitions, casts an aura of liminality. The youngsters are our guides into this unusual limbo. Perhaps church will all the time be the realm of the lifeless — monuments on the wall and flagstones on the ground remind Mass-goers of when a crypt was full of the our bodies of the trustworthy departed and a website of worship was surrounded by the Church Triumphant. In these darkened, grave-like church buildings, our little one guides infuse recent life into previous rituals and areas.

In “The Pew,” two younger girls sit in entrance of a wall monument for a deceased member of the congregation. Their hair is wrapped in towels, a home tête-à-tête of two girls recent out of a bathe. They sit on a pew, within the type of the sacrament of confession.

In a few of the most affecting pictures, Santos Briones captures the supernatural lighting interacting with childhood in movement. In “Camila,” a small lady runs towards a highlight within the nave — her literal journey throughout a tessellated church ground spirals out right into a mosaic of meanings: religious pilgrimage, the political actuality of immigration, the drive of imaginative hope, working to the sunshine.

In “Playground,” two younger ladies play in a chapel, strolling on an altar rail like gymnasts on a stability beam. Behind one of many ladies, a sconce creates a halo round her hair. The younger girls body the tabernacle like two patrons in a medieval portray. They may be youngsters; they may be two saints lining the Immaculate Conception hanging above the altar; they’re additionally, on this composition, angelic. They are emblematic of the sacred observe of hospitality on the coronary heart of the sanctuary motion.

“Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing this some people have entertained angels without knowing it,” the Letter to the Hebrews enjoins (Hebrews 13:2). While, sure, hospitality like Abraham and Sarah’s is usually rewarded with an surprising divine blessing distributed through entertained angels, what the creator actually guarantees is extra fearsome. The Hebrew phrase for “angel” means a “messenger,” one despatched from God to ship a divine phrase. Perhaps the message you will have opened your property to is one you don’t want to listen to, and but you could.

Sitting on the previous church pew, gazing by way of the stained glass frames into the lives of Santos Briones’ topics, I couldn’t assist however really feel that these small lives her lens had captured, residing within the shadows, confined in church basements, coming from the margins, have given us the divine message we so desperately want to listen to.

Top picture: The Pew, New York City, (2017) by Cinthya Santos Briones. Courtesy of the artist and BAXTER ST at CCNY.