Beatriz Santiago Muñoz (born and lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico) explores tensions arising from social and political interconnections inherent to the postcolonial Caribbean context. Taking an engaged activist position, she challenges the regimes of visibility that institute a hierarchy of what is shown, foregrounding—or suppressing—events, social groups, and minority narratives. Through their poetic, performative, and sensory dimensions, her videos blur the boundary between fiction and documentary. She integrates experimental ethnography, feminisms, and the participatory theatre of Brazilian playwright and activist Augusto Boal, who devoted his life to developing strategies that would enable people outside of theatrical discourse to express themselves.

In Poetic Disorder, Santiago Muñoz brings together four works that, each in its own way, address and embody the complexities underlying the notion of care—a term based in the idea of commitment, being both a process and activity (taking care), and a mode of resistance. The centrepiece of the exhibition, the installation Binaural, comprises six 16 mm projections intersecting in the gallery. The images, shot in Puerto Rico and the Solomon Islands, show a vertical sunset, a forest, and a fisherman. The films, developed with vegetal dyes made from local plants, present a humble yet sensitive portrait of the islands. Gosila, filmed in the wake of one of the most violent hurricanes ever to hit Puerto Rico, is about the light that filters into life, even after such a disaster. Uncovering the chaos left by the storm, the images enwrap us in slowness, reflecting the long process of resilience. In La cabeza mató a todos, Santiago Muñoz takes inspiration from an Indigenous myth, based on the passage of a shooting star, to cast a spell on military industries. Puerto Rican activist and botanist Mapenzi Chibale Nonó, accompanied by a black cat embodying the heavenly body, endeavours throughout the video to activate the spell. Also addressing the question of the supernatural, Marché Salomonfeatures Marcelin Exiliere and Mardochelene Chevry, two young people working at the market in Port-au-Prince, who wonder about the possible divine nature of everyday things—a branded water bottle, a toxic river, a dead goat. Together, these four video projects develop a narrative of coexistence carried by imagination, emotions, and discrepancies. The cinematographic constellation created by Santiago Muñoz proposes a nonlinear, prismatic way of seeing the world, a plural reading that takes over from the single, disembodied vision promulgated by colonialism and Western thought.

— Stefanie Hessler, in collaboration with Camille Georgeson-Usher, Maude Johnson and Himali Singh Soin

La cabeza mató a todos, 2014
HD Video, colour, sound, 7 min. 30 sec.

Courtesy of the artist

La cabeza Mato à Todos looks in on a nighttime meeting between a black cat and Puerto Rico-based artist and activist Mapenzi Chibale Nonó. Speaking in Nonó’s voice the cat shares instructions for a spell to destroy the war machine. They describe the origin of androgynous people and note how the artistic act is first magical before it is symbolic. Nonó listens on and smokes. They collect local foliage; dance to a punk song and continue moving as the music gives way to the surrounding croaks of the coquí frog.

Obscure as the view offered is, with darkness closing tightly around Nonó, Santiago Muñoz’s short video is anchored in Puerto Rico. The work’s foreboding title, which translates as “The Head that Killed Everyone,” echoes local myth of a shooting star seen as a plummeting head announcing a time of tumult. In casting Nonó, an artist committed to local botany, community building, and alternative education, Santiago Muñoz presents a view through the keyhole on the clandestine preparation and incarnation of a queer, anti-imperial and decolonial practice.

EXPLORE

Altered states. Consider the different ways that knowledge is transmitted, and learning is enacted in this work.

Magical forms. Listen and look for the emphasis on form—the wording of the spell, the act of drawing, dancing. Can this work itself be seen as a magic ritual? Can you identify ritual- or magic-like elements in the other works in the exhibition?

Marché Salomon, 2015
HD Video, colour, sound, 16 min.

Courtesy of the artist

“I am not convinced.”

Throughout their workday Marcelin Exiliere and Mardochelene Chevry trade differing views on the life forces that surround them. Behind the chopping block portioning out goat meat, walking and looking around the Port-au-Prince market where they work, Exiliere and Chevry wonder aloud about which objects possess spirits, if commerce keeps these forces away, what to do when tempted by a black hole, and if they’ve seen zombies in the market. During a break, they take pause from their exchange to bring index finger and thumb together, each holding their hand to their eye before surveying the market again.

Important for Santiago Muñoz’s is how the camera is integrated into a context, in this case the market as galaxy. What role does the camera take amidst the objects, people, and forces that populate this galaxy? And what constitutes a camera? Compared to Exiliere and Chevry’s view through their fingers, how might a view through Santiago Muñoz’s camera approach the limits of the visual, so to follow Exiliere’s instructions: “If you look beyond these things, there is something else. Look, look.”

Explore

“Ok listen here.” Where in the exhibition are you invited or instructed to listen, to adjust your viewpoint, or act? Where are you drawn into the camera’s view, sharing in its observations and sensing its presence?

World making. Across the works in the exhibition note the different ways world-making or remaking the world are chronicled. Are these always fantastic instances? Or does the everyday also come into these processes?

Gosila, 2018
16 mm and HD video transferred to video, colour, sound, Fresnel lens, 10 min.

Courtesy of the artist

Through a slow and fragmentary advance, Gosila tours Puerto Rico in the aftermath of hurricanes Irma and Maria. Making landfall in quick succession in September 2017, the storms ripped apart homes, flooded communities, and shattered the island’s long neglected infrastructure. Maria plunged Puerto Rico into a three-day blackout, cutting communications off, crippling relief and medical aid, and leaving some without electricity for a year. The storms met the island in the grip of a disastrous debt crisis, its political and economic autonomy long undermined by its status as an unincorporated territory of the United States, a condition where it is neither a state nor a sovereign nation. As the winds and rains passed, the consequences of the island’s position within racial, colonial and extractive capitalism, and its vulnerability to climate change, were left all the more raw and exposed.

Feeling its way around the upturned island, Gosila lingers on the slow, quiet, and complex activity of life after the disaster. Following floodwaters, watching land clearing, listening in on dreams, gently swaying on the dance floor, Gosila opens onto the small acts of autonomy, exploring social and political composition in the hands of the people.

Explore

Picturing relief. In what ways does Santiago Muñoz represent “relief”? Is it an act, as in relief efforts, or can it also be sensed and seen in other ways?

Monster movies. How does Godzilla (Gosila) relate to Santiago Muñoz’s work? What or who are the monstrous protagonists of Santiago Muñoz’s film? What are their sources and causes?

Binaural, 2019
6-channel 16mm film installation, colour and black and white, loop: Horizonte Vertical 2 min. 25 sec., Duerme 59 sec., Geometria 1 min. 20 sec., La luz del tunel 46 sec., Vaeno Wayne 2 min. 43 sec., Jengibres 1 min. 26 sec.

Courtesy of the artist

Among the works in the exhibition, Binaural is the one that perhaps most actively positions you as a visitor. What then to make Santiago Muñoz’s statement that, “[t]here are many more positions for the maker than for the spectator who strolls idly and disinterestedly through the galleries. Here the spectator, the viewer, is a ghost.”

In her essay “I Am Going to Describe a Ritual,” Santiago Muñoz questions how the consumption of art is valued over the processes the artist undergoes in making it. For Santiago Muñoz, the camera is an appendage or organ that changes the artist, which is to say, that the camera moves them and guides them, drawing them in and altering their perspective and standpoint. As the artist is consumed by the camera, so Santiago Muñoz wonders how the viewer can put aside their desire for a single representative image and begin to sense how to relate their outsider’s perspective to the other experiences at play in the work. Note that Binaural, a silent work, has an acoustic title; a prompt for you to make use of your senses beyond the visual.

Shot in Puerto Rico and the Solomon Islands, what can be seen in Binaural? Foraging for plants, swaying in a hammock, scanning a sideways horizon, narrating a carved relief, and a neon flickering in the dark. Also present, though at a molecular level, are the islands’ flora from which Santiago Muñoz extracted the chemicals used to develop the films. Just as Santiago Muñoz sees the artist and viewer each responsible for reshaping their senses, so she transforms the film process into something resembling photosynthesis, altering its sensitivity and further fusing it with the environment taken in through the camera’s lens.

EXPLORE

Tourist’s camera. How does Santiago Muñoz circumvent, fragment, or refuse the tourist’s gaze and its tropical fantasies?

Surrounding conditions. What form of environment does Binaural construct in the exhibition space? How do you situate yourself within it? How do you navigate it? And, how do you relate each element to the others?

“I am going to describe a ritual.” In A Universe of Fragile Mirrors. Miami: Pérez Art Museum, 2016.

“Radical Form.” In Beatriz Santiago Muñoz: Capp Street Project. San Francisco: CCA Wattis Institute, 2008. PDF link

An important reference for Santiago Muñoz is experimental ethnographic filmmaking and in particular the films and writing of French anthropologist Jean Rouch who worked in Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Niger, and Mali from the mid-1940s until his death in 2004.

Influenced by Soviet avant-garde cinema, Rouch writes of film-think to describe the ways of sensing and understanding made possible by the camera. Equally influenced by Surrealism, he saw film’s doubling of the real world as opening onto imaginary worlds. In this parallel world, Rouch found an analogue to the ritual practices and the space of sprits and dreams that he studied, describing the camera as a crossing-point and drawing him into a film-trance. Ultimately, Rouch claimed his filmmaking offered for study a record of a “shared anthropology,” a document resulting from an ambiguous dialogue run with contradictions, where all parties involved modify themselves to and are changed by the situation.

Based in Puerto Rico, Santiago Muñoz criss-crosses the Caribbean’s arc of islands with her work and makes the leap from the Atlantic to the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean. For Martiniquan philosopher Édouard Glissant, the interconnected geographies, histories, and social make-up of the Caribbean islands make possible a form archipelagic thinking. As a type of region, the archipelago can be seen as the antithesis to the continent, the former’s scattering of islands dwarfed by the surrounding waters compared to the latter’s expansive mass of land. Archipelagic thinking favours a web of in-between positions rather than a single, fixed centre point. Multiplicity, variation, and locality are key for this type of thinking that rises from cross-cultural exchange.

In a similar vein, Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite proposes the term tidelectic in place of dialect to encompass the complex life of spoken language in the Caribbean. Often used pejoratively, dialect sets up a comparison and subservience to an official and imposed colonial language. In place of suppression, Brathwaite suggests that within this context language and mother tongues can be thought of and experienced as submerged. Tidelectics then accounts for the persistent rhythmic, circulatory, and expansive presence of a multitude of “unofficial” languages in the consequences of colonialism.

Roleplaying and improvisation occupy an important place in Santiago Munoz’s practice. Rather than occasions for reverie or escape, these theatrical elements are instead approached as processes through which new and radical political thought and action can take form.

In thinking this she draws from the work of Brazilian political activist and dramaturge Augusto Boal, author of Theatre of the Oppressed where he outlined theories and methods emerging from his experiments with participatory theatre in Brazil under the military dictatorship in the 1960s and later in Peru in the 1970s.

For Boal, theatre under capitalism had too long been presented to the public as entertainment. At its most schematic, conventional theatre sets up boundaries between spectators and performers, assigning them passive and active roles, and risked enforcing social hierarchies. By contrast, Boal’s liberated theatre offered a space for the shared examination of social relations. Through his exercises the spectator-participant, or “spect-actor,” began to learn how to transform their sense of self, their relationships, and their surrounding conditions. In a similar vein, where conventional theatre uncritically relayed canonical works, Boal adapted productions to reflect the political urgencies at that moment. Theatre became an emancipatory weapon and a stage for self-determination: “No matter that the action is fictional; what matters is that it is action!”

http://fabricainutil.com

https://www.momentabiennale.com

Boal, Augusto. Theatre of the Oppressed. Translated from the Spanish by Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride and Emily Fryer. London: Pluto Press, 2008.

Bonilla, Yarimar. “The Coloniality of Disaster: Race, Empire and the Temporal Logics of Emergency in Puerto Rico, USA.” Political Geography 78 (2020).

Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. The History of Voice. London: New Beacon, 1984.

Ferdinand, Malcolm. A Decolonial Ecology : Thinking from the Caribbean World. Translated by Anthony Paul Smith. Cambridge: Polity, 2022.

Glissant, Édouard. Treatise on the Whole-World. Translated by Celia Britton. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020.

Neyra, Ren Ellis. The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020.

Puerto Rico Syllabus. https://puertoricosyllabus.com/

Rouch, Jean. Ciné-Ethnography. Edited and translated from the French by Steven Feld. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

Sheller, Mimi. Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020.

Vergès, Françoise. “Racial Capitalocene: Is the Anthropocene racial?” Verso Blog, August 30, 2017. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3376-racial-capitalocene