ART CITIES:N.York-Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
Often documenting her interactions with specific individuals and communities, Beatriz’s Santiago Muñoz films and videos focus on how social relations are embodied in particular places and gestures. The artist develops her work together with the people she portrays, using performance and re-enactment as strategies for self-representation and for developing a greater awareness of one’s environment and circumstances.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: New Museum Archive
The subjects of her films and videos reveal their close physical connections to their environments, sites marked by legacies of colonial trade and military occupation in the artist’s homeland of Puerto Rico and in neighboring Caribbean countries, by recounting stories and engaging natural materials as well as inherited or handmade objects. Beatriz Santiago Muñoz in her solo exhibition “Song, Strategy, Sign”, at the New Museum, Santiago Muñoz premieres the new three-channel video “That which identifies them like the eye of the Cyclops”. The three parts are titled as a sequence: “One/Song”, “Two/Strategy” and “Three/Signs”. The footage emerged from years of contact between Santiago Muñoz and a group of women, and each video channel corresponds loosely to a different theme in Monique Wittig’s 1969 novel “Les Guérillères”, which describes a world where the patriarchy has fallen after a bloody war between the sexes. Like the novel, the video closely follows the sensorial and material worlds of the women and imagines a post-patriarchal future. The women portrayed in the video are real, and the story is rooted in the specific place and time that they inhabit, including: Caribbean cities, bankrupted states, and coastal towns. The video documents the injured farm animals that the women care for, a concert on a beach at night, a frenzied club, and a protest campsite in front of government buildings. The exhibition also feature a set of commissioned masks, which will be activated in a series of new films and videos made during the artist’s residency this spring. The masks will be featured in a performance by one of the women of the film, Macha Colón (the stage name of Gisela Rosario, a queer performer in the underground music scene in Puerto Rico) in the New Museum Theater on June 2/6/16. Santiago Muñoz’s silent 16mm film “Black Beach/Horse/Camp/The Dead/Forces” portrays people, places, and things she has come to know through previous projects. The film was shot on the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico, which was the site of a bombing range used by the US Navy for 60 years and is still filled with unexploded bombs. The film weaves together images of a man who cares for horses that roam the old target range where the bombs lie, a black magnetite beach that is slowly eroding, an artist who has helped to resurrect a sacred tree that was once on the naval base and who has herself been resurrected from illness more than once, and a man who hopes his ritual movements will return the island to a cosmic balance. Together, their stories tell interlacing accounts of land, toxic bombings, political work, celebration, and death.
Info: Curators: Johanna Burton, Lauren Cornell &Sara O’Keeffe, New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, Duration: 20/4-12/6/16, Days & Hours: Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.newmuseum.org
