Foreign in a Domestic Sense (2021)

Foreign in a Domestic Sense is a constellation of testimonies and imaginaries of Puerto Ricans who have migrated to Central Florida in recent years, conjured by visual artists Natalia Lassalle-Morillo and Sofía Gallisá Muriente. Their images evoke, accompany and connect the lived experiences of people who are part of the fastest-growing Puerto Rican population in the United States, as a result of political and environmental disasters in the archipelago. Just as displacement unsettles space and time, the four channel film layers fictional and non-fictional narrative forms in video and Super8 film, speculating on how community is created through recreation and how cultural hybridity signals to the future. As the ubiquitous presence of water in times of rising tides suggests that Florida will soon become an island, the artists envision a dance floor emerging in the darkness of a swamp, where their subjects become dancers finding each other and learning to move freely.