Join Beatriz Santiago Muñoz and Puerto Rican anthropologist Yarimar Bonilla as they discuss radical politics, sense-making and racio-colonial capitalism in the Caribbean. As an entry point to the conversation the event will commence with a screening of Santiago Muñoz’s Gosila (2018), shot in the aftermath of hurricane Maria and one of four works you can see onsite at Gallery as part of Poetic Disorder.

Yarimar Bonilla is the Director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College. She is also a Professor in the Department of Africana, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Hunter College and in the PhD Program in Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment (2015), co-editor of Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm (2019), and a founder of the Puerto Rico Syllabus Project. In addition, Yarimar is a prominent public intellectual and a leading voice on Caribbean and Latinx politics. She writes a monthly column in the Puerto Rican newspaper El Nuevo Día titled “En Vaivén,” (Back and Forth) is a regular contributor to publications such as The Washington Post, The Nation, Jacobin, and The New Yorker, and a frequent guest on National Public Radio and news programs such as Democracy Now! Her current research—for which she was named a 2018-2020 Carnegie Fellow —examines the politics of recovery in Puerto Rico after hurricane Maria and the forms of political and social trauma that the storm revealed.

Frantz Voltaire is president of Centre International de Documentation et d’Information Haïtienne, Caribéenne et Afro-Canadienne, which he founded in 1981. Born in Haiti in 1948, he studied history and political science at Universidad de Chile, Université de Montréal, and Université du Québec à Montréal. He has taught at the Universidad de Chile, Université de Montréal, Université du Québec à Montréal, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and Université d’État d’Haïti. He is the author of numerous books, notably Une brève histoire des communautés noires du Canada (2007), Le problème de l’habitat en Haïti (2008), and Pouvoir Noir en Haïti (1998) and is the director of the award-winning documentaries Une histoire de la Banque (2015), Les chemins de la mémoire, and Port-au-Prince, ma ville (2000).

These tours reserve a recurrent space for Arabic speakers to meet and engage in critical exchanges on contemporary art and exhibition making. The Gallery is pleased to welcome Kodeih with this event and thanks Emma Haraké for the commitment and conviviality she brought to the Arabic language program since initiating it in 2017.  Haraké will continue to collaborate with the Gallery on the oral history ممتلكات project Mumtalakat.

Lynn Kodeih is an artist, researcher and educator, born in Beirut, Lebanon and based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal since 2020. Holding an MFA in theater and performance studies from USJ, Beirut, Kodeih is a current master’s student in visual arts at Université du Québec à Montréal. She has held teaching positions at Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts, and St. Joseph University in Beirut, and was Head of Academic Programs at the Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar. Her work mixes writing, video, and performance, and she is interested in notions of space, borders, wandering, and belonging. Kodeih is co-founder of polycephaly, a research and conversation platform on art and politics.

In response to the film’s three-part structure, Lloréns will offer contextualization through historical, anthropological, and decolonial lenses. Underscoring the significance of framing in the crafting of narratives about place, life, and the people of Puerto Rico, Lloréns will call attention to the dissonance and tension between the film’s narratives and her own scholarly observations about the complexities of living in a rapidly modernizing 20^th century Puerto Rico. The ninety-minute event will open with the twenty-minute screening followed by Lloréns’ talk and question period.

Dr. Hilda Lloréns’ research and writing are concerned with understanding how race, gender, socioeconomic class, the social practices of power and structural inequalities intersect in several areas of cultural, social, and environmental life. Her research interests include cultural production and national representations, migration and diaspora, and the environment and ecology in the Americas. She has published widely about these issues in academic journals as well as in popular readership on-line and print magazines. Among her academic books are Imaging the Great Puerto Rican Family: Framing Nation, Race and Gender during the American Century (2014) and Making Livable Worlds: Afro-Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice (2021). Dr. Lloréns is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Marine Affairs at the University of Rhode Island.

Digitization of One Film/Three Scripts courtesy of the Visual Collections Repository (VCR), Faculty of Fine Arts, Concordia University.