Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
b. 1972, San Juan, Puerto Rico
Lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico
venue
Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans
900 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Monday, 11 AM–5 PM
Tuesday, closed
Wednesday–Sunday, 11 AM–5 PM
neighborhood
Downtown/Central Business District (CBD)
about the project
Cuervo and Low-Polygon Poem, 2021
Two-channel color HD video with sound; 26 mins.
Courtesy the artist
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s video is an interrogation of place, the Caribbean specifically, as well as the medium of film itself. Projecting onto both a traditional screen and a sheer curtain, Santiago Muñoz’s video combines footage from her native Puerto Rico and a 2020 trip to Haiti to visualize links between these places and New Orleans, which is often referred to as “the northernmost Caribbean city.” The film moves swiftly between documentation, interviews, scientific and computer-generated footage, and ethereal imagery, juxtaposing the everyday with the otherworldly while pointing to the ecological and cultural similarities and divergences among these places. Translation emerges as a mode of differentiation: in Puerto Rico, flour and salt suggest bread, but in Haiti they suggest veves—religious symbols used in various Voodoo practices.
The video is at times obscured by a darkness that comes after nightfall in regions that have experienced widespread power outages, like those that followed Hurricane Maria in 2017 in Puerto Rico—familiar to those who experienced Hurricane Ida in 2021 or Hurricane Katrina in 2005 in New Orleans. Santiago Muñoz also interrogates the medium of film by the other sense central to film: hearing. What does the taste of salt sound like? Is it possible to translate from one sense to another? Is translation between languages (or places, spaces, perspectives) even truly possible, or is it always merely an approximation?
about the artist
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz is an artist who works primarily with film and video, whether as single-channel works or moving image installations. She approaches each work as a structured improvisation involving the film's materials and grounded in the phenomenological world and history of her subject, whether it is a person, a movement, or a place. Her present work is concerned with a visual poetics of the Caribbean, the sensorial unconscious of anti-colonialism, and wreckage in all its forms. Recent solo exhibitions include Beatriz Santiago Muñoz: Field Station at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University (2019); Nuevos Materiales at Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico (2018); Rodarán cabezas at Espacio Odeón in Bogotá, Colombia; and A Universe of Fragile Mirrors at Pérez Art Museum Miami (2016). Her work has also been shown in the Whitney Biennial, New York (2017), New Museum for Contemporary Art, New York; and El Museo del Barrio, New York; among others.
Beatriz Santiago-Muñoz, Cuervo and Low-Polygon Poem, 2021 (stills). Two-channel color HD video with sound, 26 minutes. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. Photo: Alex Marks