Artists

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz (born in San Juan, Puerto Rico; 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.

Born
San Juan, Puerto Rico
Countries / Nations
Puerto Rico
Lives
San Juan, Puerto Rico

Works

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz: Poetic Disorder

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 Salomon features 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.