Sofía Gallisá Muriente

Combining home movies, 16mm footage, audiotape, and an original score, Gallisá Muriente’s poetic excavation oscillates between chronicle, dream, and document. Where people and nature meet, she uncovers environmental and colonial memories from her grandmother’s past and in the landscape of Puerto Rico.

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.

Portrait of El Bohío, a traditional structure recreated in the backyard of the home of Luis Muñoz Marín, the first Puerto Rican elected governor (1948-1964). Infamous as the place where he hosted politicians and intellectuals. Filmed after the passing of Hurricane María, which tore off the straw roof and ravaged the trees around it to reveal modern, cement walk-ups behind it. Shot on 16mm film and hand-developed with Anamú, a medicinal plant native to Puerto Rico.

A visual survey of the mosque inside the Jamaat al Muslimeen and Madressa compound in Trinidad and Tobago.

A visual record of the dungeons that survive from what was La Princesa prison; now an office of the Department of Tourism of Puerto Rico. Various groups of tourists that visited on a day like any other are overheard sharing their versions of the history and significance of the place.

In 1955, Paramount News, “the eyes and ears of the world”, projected in movie theaters around the United States images of a plane landing in Puerto Rico carrying 2 tons of snow and a family from New Hampshire, and of the thousands of young people that received them in a baseball field. These 40 seconds of film are possibly the only surviving audiovisual document of an event that persists as a foggy memory in the conscience of most Puerto Ricans. Rain with Snow is a double projection that tries to visualize the ideological production processes behind these images, zooming in, stretching out and manipulating the last cinematic vestige of this moment. Through editing, intentions are subverted and new meanings are uncovered which were repressed in the construction process that trivialized this event to turn it into easily digestible information.