Beatriz Santiago Muñoz

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz brings together various forms of non-linear thinking and simultaneous temporalities that challenge traditional ways of reading with El cuervo, la fosa, y la yegua (The Raven, the Pit and the Mare). Taking as her model a method of Sanskrit poetry that tells two stories in the same text at the same time, Santiago Muñoz explores acts of simultaneous narration to juxtapose images and sounds from seemingly disconnected universes. For instance, a madeleine is both a pastry and an idea; language is historical and abstract; in the “historical now,” there is a plastic cup and a robotic arm at the bottom of the ocean. Each day, a mare visits a junkyard near an overgrown forest and tries to mate with a Corvette. A traditional Haitian proverb states: the snake can only be measured once it’s dead. Consider things you can’t see but know are real—the bottom of the Puerto Rico Trench, the Marassa Jumeaux, our attachments to past orders.

A global portrait documenting the year's events, Cinetracts '20 features the work of an international lineup of 20 filmmakers. Capturing the zeitgeist in their own backyard, the artists' short films are the culmination of a year-long residency project.

Two young workers at a busy Port-au-Prince open air market have a conversation about the mystical properties of common objects and whether the divine can inhabit any kind of object—mass produced bottles, toxic rivers, beheaded goats.

Instructions to destroy the military-industrial apparatus with a spell. The form of this spell is precise. With Michelle Nonó.

Set in a former US Navy base in Puerto Rico, Ojos para mis enemigos (Eyes for my enemies) observes how multiple introduced and indigenous species—plants and crops, but also animals, humans and not—share this terrain and together constitute a new space, offering poetic as well as very concrete scenarios of the anthropocene, its devastation but also modes of recuperation.

Nocturne was shot over 10 days (mostly at night), while thinking about material and poetic transformation—in dreams, in darkness, through objects or ideas—in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. During this time I was hosted by the Quatre Chemins Festival, whose collaborators became an important part of the project. Daphne Menard, appears in Nocturne singing a traditional Haitian song about a young man who goes off to buy coffee and is arrested by police. Guy Regis Junior's mother, an assiduous lottery player, describes her lottery dreams and the common system for deciphering their codes. Two young theater students, from ENARTS, Port-au-Prince's art school, rehearse a speech, written for the occasion.

Farmacopeas are catalogs of plants and their uses. Farmacopea is a film on the relationship between historical processes and the natural landscape of Puerto Rico. Hippomane mancinella, the little apple of death, is one of the most toxic plants in the world. Just sitting beneath it for an afternoon can make you sick for days. If the tree is burned, its smoke can be dangerous and cause permanent blindness. Though it was an important part of the native farmacopea, most Manchineel trees were erradicated. The landscape of the Caribbean has been thoroughly transformed: physically, through introduced species, agriculture and development but also through its visual representation as an undifferentiated tropical place for tourism, service and folklore.

La Cueva Negra is a moving image project and photo series which explores the Paso del Indio site as a layered repository of symbolic and material histories. The site is well known in the archaeological community. Twenty years ago, during the construction of a multi-lane highway, a complex (possibly Archaic, definitely Pre-Taíno and Taíno) indigenous burial site was discovered and many objects and remains recovered. But the site was paved over for the construction of the expressway.

Shot from the old fuel dock, a mile-and-a-half-long structure once used to service battleships and now used by fishermen as a new short at the decommissioned US Naval Base of Roosevelt Roads in Ceiba, Puerto Rico. The view from the dock is, on one side, the Island of Vieques, and on the other; Vieques Sound--a passage that connects the Caribbean Sea with the Atlantic Ocean. The film is shot through a mirrored object, a formal experiment in order to transform and collapse the monumentality of the view, taking cues from shore fisherman who transform the base's use and meaning.

Oneiromancer is the first of a series of works on the sensorial unconscious of the Puerto Rican anti-colonial movement. It centers on the figures, places, materials, and leftover materials of the members of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional, a clandestine group, who were arrested and sentenced to near-lifetime prison terms for seditious conspiracy, a political crime.

A beekeeper manages the bees that are part of the soundtrack. The afternoon light streams into the theater for 45 minutes to an hour every day and projects images of the forest that has grown in the 10 years since the closing of the base.