Actualina Takes Root In Place
Actualina2026 Visual Art Grant Recipient
Actualina (she/they) surfaced in 2020 in Ka Pae ʻĀina o Hawaiʻi during research for the project A Record of Drifting Across the Sea. This year, she will work alongside a community of artists/advisors across the archipelago. For Actualina Takes Root in Place, Actualina builds an Agit, a hypothetical and allegorical place for hui intended to revive dying cinema culture. Gathering participants, she cooks, screens films, listens to and singssongs, and alters a residence into an Agit with various designers. This Agit functions as a site of shared inquiry, relationship-building—grounding work in collective process, where she proposes a prototype for a new institution fitted for today’s complex landscape. She will make videos and music, publicly accessible locally and beyond Moananuiākea. When cinema fades, films scatter—people must move together to encounter them. The project culminates in productions developed through the concept of Agit, shared in Hawaiʻi, then extended to Bergen, Norway, and Gwangju, Korea.
Actualina Fabrizia Spallina is from the North Shore and has lived across many eras and geographies. In recent years, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, and Hawaiʻi have been home. Moving between music, moving image, arranging gatherings, and fermentation, she works in states of transformation, often blurring instruction with reverie. When not walking Oʻahu’s ridge lines, making winter cakes, brewing spring makgeolli, or surrendering to summer naps, she begrudgingly spreads joy and knowledge through her channel on the Internet. An expert in few things besides brewing culture, the art of disappearing, and various singing techniques; she continually engages in an effort to maintain a mindset that keeps her in a mode of deep learning and engages with a state of deeper dreaming.