From the 10th to the 23rd of July 2019, Puerto Rico, a Caribbean archipelago that has been subjected to U.S. colonialism for the last 121 years, was gripped by mass protests in which thousands took to the streets shouting “Ricky Renuncia!” This was a blistering demand for the resignation of the island’s governor Ricardo Rosselló, leader of the pro-statehood New Progressive Party, which aims to end Puerto Rico’s unincorporated territorial status as the “oldest and most populous colony in the world” by making it the 51st American state.1 The revolts against Rosselló were sparked by the leak of almost 900 pages of email conversations that took place between late 2018 and early 2019, in which the governor and 11 members of his cabinet disparaged women, LGBTQ+ people and the victims of Hurricane Maria, which devastated the island in 2017.
Roselló was swiftly replaced by the equally objectionable governor Wanda Vázquez, who had also been embroiled in political scandals. These included accusations of failing to investigate the misappropriation of Hurricane Maria recovery supplies, defunding services for domestic violence victims, and instituting stricter regulations on people’s eligibility for federal funding. Regardless of their disappointing outcome, the anti-Roselló protests marked a turning point in Puerto Rican politics by engaging people across the archipelago and the Puerto Rican diaspora against a political establishment that has failed to represent, advocate and work for them. The revolutionary action and spirit that led to Roselló’s resignation will not be brushed over or undermined in the collective memory of Puerto Ricans. Instead, the events that took place seem likely to be celebrated as the convergence of more than a century of anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist, anti-military, LGBTQ+ and ecological struggles in the region. Meanwhile, the leaders of the so-called “land of the free” remain apathetic to their actions as colonisers. The United States still denies Puerto Rico’s autonomy by maintaining economic control over the region through the instigation of punishing austerity measures, all in a bid to manage the manufactured ‘debt crisis’ that continues to rip apart the territory’s social fabric.
My first introduction to the resistance of the Puerto Rican people against the military and colonial presence surrounding them came at a screening of work by Puerto Rican artist and filmmaker Beatriz Santiago Muñoz at the Tate Modern on January 9th 2019. Her expansive moving image works unite the poetic languages of the Caribbean with experimental ethnography, feminist thought and aspects of Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed to visually articulate the effects of militarisation and industrialisation on indigenous land and anarchist communities.2 In her work she also explores the experiences of political prisoners who are not legally declared or known as such due to the obfuscating mechanisms of the colonial state. The depth and breadth of Muñoz’s knowledge of the land and its people – and the theories which she employs for the ordering and expression of their lives and experiences – is palpable in each frame. The rendering of images so that they can seem to be touched or felt appears to be what Muñoz strives to elicit through her filmmaking practice. What she produces can be thought of as image-objects, as they create sensations that exceed the visual and travel to other zones of feeling, in particular touch and hapticity. Her film ‘10 years/long exposure’ (2014) is made up of a set of 80 slides of 35mm film made from the transfer of a 16mm film that was found on the floor of a cinema in the decommissioned Roosevelt Roads U.S. Navy base on the eastern coast of Puerto Rico. Although the 16mm film had lost much of its emulsion over time – and with it, the clarity of its filmed images – it was still possible through its transfer to higher resolution 35mm film to make out a fighter pilot wearing an oxygen mask, pilots milling about planes and other sequences depicting submarines, fighter jets and the recognisable instruments of military expansion and power. The slides themselves are shown as blown-up projections on a screen and appear grainy and discoloured, in soft browns with undertones of green, purple and orange appearing every so often, contrasting with the spotty textures of the image’s surface. Every detail of the film, from its beginnings as a discarded and then found object to its artistic manipulation by Muñoz, is an invitation to think about the ways in which the labour of a filmmaker and that of a historian are linked. The film as image-object exists in two temporalities, one as an artefact that testifies to the militarisation of Puerto Rico and the other as a series of images unfolding in the present. But this history – and the present, too – remains as volatile as the film on which it was made, perilously balanced, as though on purpose, on the edge of disintegration.
A central preoccupation of Muñoz’s work is the attempt to make material that which at first does not appear to be so. In an interview she gave in 2015 to the art publication Terremoto, she describes her filmmaking style as a practice of observation in which she “tries to go back and unite poetic thinking, form, the material and the sensorial with political and economic processes.”3 These processes – the visible and, at times, invisible means of control through which Puerto Rico remains a colony of the United States – are undermined and subtly exposed in Muñoz’s filmmaking, which is visually invested in what the senses perceive, what can be felt, touched and held. For her, the function and power of poetry – “[p]oetic thinking, form, the material and the sensorial” – is that it challenges the dominant social and political structures that seek to abstract and reduce people’s lives to their market or economic value. She groups these terms together show that poems are not just words on a page but have a deep relationship to the physical world they inhabit, and in that sense they are sensory and material. And if, as feminist theorists such as Karen Barad have argued, our senses make known to us “an infinity of others – other beings, other spaces, other times”, sensuality is crucial to dismantling the idea that we exist as isolated self-contained units, that we can be anything other than what we are as humans: fragile and vulnerable in our need for each other.4 This way of thinking and feeling animates film-poetry as political strategy.
‘Gosila’ (2018) focuses on the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Characteristically slow, like most of Muñoz’s films, it requires a patient adjustment to its rhythms of daily life. Shot on 16mm, the film begins with two horses copulating in a backyard with uneven patches of grass and dirt; just a few feet behind them lie felled trees, a truck and a house with a red fence. Pink and orange light passes over the screen. Next we see an upside down view of trees, mountains and a blue sky with a single cloud, which move by with the speed and cadence of the car from which the film is shot. The image rights itself and men and women labouring in a field come into view. They cut down the trees with machetes and lift tree stumps to clear vegetation damaged by the hurricane, which left residents without power in what would become the longest-running outage in the United States and its territories. Puerto Rico’s power company and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers did not act quickly or adequately when it came to restoring electricity, so people in southern Puerto Rico endeavoured to do it on their own, pulling power lines and digging wooden posts. Muñoz breaks up these scenes with the inverted shots of trees and a car driving through thick brown water, moving to the beat of a song sung in Spanish, and images of neighbourhoods affected by the hurricane, all literally – and metaphorically – turned upside down. A girl wearing thick, black-rimmed glasses holds up a piece of broken glass and looks through it. She provides a near-rhyme with this preferred shooting strategy, that of revealing subjects as though reflected in a concave mirror, resulting in a flipped image when the curved part of the mirror bends light at different angles. By altering the reflection of light and making the ordinary feel unsettled and turned about Muñoz depicts the slow process of recovery, and what it feels like to be abandoned by institutions and governing bodies. In this way she unites the concept of sense-making with sensual experience. To have lived through and survived a hurricane is to inherit the urgent task of ‘making sense’ of the disorder, chaos and profound changes to the environment and people’s lives. At the same time the film itself actively plays with what it means to perceive, to take in information visually. The effect created is akin to that alluded to by Audre Lorde in her essay ‘Poetry Is Not a Luxury’, where in the famous opening lines she states, “The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized”.5 Her metaphor says that change is impossible without light, for it is light that stimulates examination, critique and resistance, and urges us into an honest confrontation with life itself in all its potential and possibility. Although light is essential, Lorde does not stipulate its exact physical characteristics. She leaves room for its openness, the multiplicity of appearances and features that form its ‘quality’. Muñoz is a filmmaker of light, drawing out the various qualities of which Lorde speaks, with the hope that scrutiny – “turning the light toward” an issue – might also result in change. But how do we locate this light, and where does it come from? For Lorde it is found in poetry; for Muñoz it is in the fusion of poetic thought with filmmaking. ‘Gosila’ seems to ask an important question: How can the filmmaker use light – subverting it, bending it – to make images that permit the world to be sensed in a new way? Light is the ‘material’ of film itself, and Muñoz works with it directly here to foreground its qualities, making its conditions more visible.
‘Otro Usos’ (‘Other Uses’, 2014), another 16mm work, is mostly silent except for the sounds of birds and insects, but what is shown has little to do with this particular soundscape.6 The first image, of a sunset, seen from a dock, features mountains and a faintly cloudy sky taking up most of the screen. The viewer is not permitted a full and unobstructed view of the sunset instead it is blocked by a mirrored prism-like object called a ‘malascopio’, that Muñoz constructed and named herself, placed closest to the camera. The camera captures the three-dimensional prism from another angle, this time showing the dock in fuller detail, the water moving slowly underneath its wide metal posts. Muñoz keeps changing the position of the prism and the angle from which the dock is shot, but the camera remains fixed in one spot. We see other variations, such as images of the sea appearing in three interconnected triangles spread across the screen. We also see a man fishing, but shot through the prism, so that his body and actions fragment and repeat. Towards the end of the film, we again see the man fishing, but he is shot without the use of the prism, in a series of three: in profile, up close and at a slight distance. The film ends with him turning towards the camera with a smile, then turning away again as the encroaching sunset darkens his face. Muñoz shot ‘Otro Usos’ on the same decommissioned U.S. naval base where she found the 16mm film, Roosevelt Roads in Ceiba, using her ‘malascopios’. The malascopio is a kind of kaleidoscope: she calls it a “seeing machine, built to see wrongly”, and its application here seems borne out of a desire to provide a counter-distortion to the political and economic distortions of the state.7 The abandoned U.S. naval base symbolises the absent-presence of U.S. colonialism; its status as ‘decommissioned’ belies the ongoing economic and state violence the United States perpetrates towards Puerto Rico. Muñoz suggests that the only way to truly see the reality of this situation is to ‘see wrongly’, that is, to enter into the logic and thought that have made this world as it is, yet to arrive at something different that is capable of articulating and standing totally apart from that which gave it life.
Muñoz focuses on the environmental ramifications of U.S. colonialism in ‘Otro Usos’, an approach that informs much of her work. However, her cinema is also devoted to elucidating the psychological and emotional experience of colonisation on the colonised and the resulting creation of split-selves and divided subjectivities. In this way, she takes a page from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. At the end of the book, Fanon tells his comrades, “[W]e must turn over a new leaf. We must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man”.8 His exhortation aligns closely with the intellectual and political nature of Muñoz’s work. She seems interested in the transformative process Fanon calls for and seeks its basis in reality. How does the anti-colonial movement work out and set afoot a new man? What does it take to do so? These questions are patiently explored over the series of three films she made on the anti-colonial movement in Puerto Rico: ‘Safehouse [A Side/B Side]’ (2018), ‘Nuevos Materiales’ (‘New Materials’, 2018) and ‘Oneiromancer’ (2017). All three centre on the members of Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña (FALN), a Marxist-Leninist paramilitary organisation that advocated Puerto Rico’s complete independence from “Yanki colonial domination” through direct action, which included 130 bomb attacks in the United States throughout the 1970s and ‘80s.9 16 members of FALN were convicted for conspiracy to commit robbery, conspiracy to bomb-making, and sedition, all serving unusually long sentences, ranging between 19 to 36 years, much longer than those typically served for such crimes.
In ‘Oneiromancer’, a lawyer narrates the fate of members of FALN who were imprisoned by the U.S. government for crimes of sedition but not labelled as political prisoners. The film incorporates long shots of the back of the lawyer’s head as she goes about her work, alternately concealing or divulging information as her head moves within the frame. She employs both direct and indirect methods of storytelling, relating a previously unknown and underexamined history through, for instance, a hand leafing through a photo album belonging to members of FALN. Another long, slow shot lingers in a disused auditorium filled with newspapers whose headlines read ‘Marx on Slavery’ and copies of Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred, among other detritus of the anti-colonial movement.
‘Nuevos Materiales’ opens with a hand tenderly and inquisitively stroking a mysterious object while subtitles communicate the bearer’s attempts to correctly name it. “It has that something of a sacred object, maybe a fragment of a sacred object,” he says. ‘Safehouse [A Side/ B Side]’ is similarly concerned with objects and the narration of history. In a two-channel HD video, performers Joelle Mercedes, Pepe Álvarez, and Kairiana Nuñez Santaliz are shown in a house belonging to members of FALN. They interact with the space, moving chairs and tables, sitting, standing and walking, listening to a recording and taking a transcription, while several narrators recount the theories and politics of the movement. One of the narrators asks, “How do we create a new language? It’s language that might allow us to have a different existence; just as one is inventing a new language, we’re also trying to create a new collective body, of another order.”
‘Oneiromancer’, ‘Safehouse’ and ‘Nuevos Materiales’ respond to Fanon’s call to “work out new concepts and turn over a new leaf.” In all three films there is a disjunction between word and image, from the way ‘Oneiromancer’ relies not on direct speech but reportage, to the very literal inability to connect word with object in ‘Nuevos Materiales’, to ‘Safehouse’’s use of reported speech and performance to creates layers of ambiguity that illustrate the suppressed nature of FALN’s history. Disjunction offers Muñoz a fruitful place from which to reimagine and revive an oppositional relation to capitalism and colonialism – one that does not rely on legibility of the social order that the film critiques and rejects.
Forms of anti-colonial resistance in Muñoz’s films also take on a corporeal and mystical presence. ‘La Cabeza Mató a Todos’ (‘The Head Killed Everyone’, 2014) opens on a dark screen that holds for a few seconds before cutting to an image of an androgynous figure played by Michelle Nono smoking languidly on a hammock. The figure is lit by one stark light. A close-up of a black cat follows. The words “The cat explains how to build a spell” appear on the screen, subtitles of the Spanish. A disembodied voice conveys the cat’s instructions on how to destroy the war apparatus with a spell:
A spell or malediction requires effort that is analogous to the magic in the spell. If the magic desired is the total or absolute destruction of the machinery of war, if what you desire is the unmooring of the aerostat, that they split in half, like a nut, then the spell requires the consumption of a substantial amount of energies, like a tiger consumes the day. […] The form given to the spell, its words and its order, are precise. The drawing is not symbolic. Its shape affects behaviour and thought.
Wrapped in layers of poetic metaphor, the film operates as a coded critique of the imperialist war machine. If the spell is expressed through the cat’s words, it is also communicated through Nono’s body, which breaks out into a series of jerky and glitchy movements, a dance that begins with an abrupt surge of music and ends in a silence interrupted only by the sound of crickets. She looks as though she is under spiritual possession, a phenomenon common in Afro-Caribbean religions such as Haitian Vodou. In Spirit Possession in French, Haitian and Voudou Thought: An Intellectual History, Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken traces a movement from dispossession to healing and solace in ‘possession’, in ‘repossessing’ the only space that one can control, the landscape of the body.10 The cat’s poetic utterances and Nono’s movements likewise represent incursions of embodied, spiritual and non-western knowledge systems into the terrain of U.S. colonial and imperialist logic, with its aerostats and atomic bombs.
In ‘La Cabreza Mató a Todos’, non-western knowledge and belief systems challenge imperialist and capitalist hegemonies over colonised land and peoples. Feminist theorist Silvia Federici describes the conditions and preconditions of capitalist development as enforcing a rigid “disciplining of the body” that destroyed the medieval conception of the body as a repository of magical powers.11 She writes in Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation that ”at the basis of magic was an animistic conception of nature that did not admit to any separation between matter and spirit, and thus imagined the cosmos as a living organism.”12 At the open market in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, the setting of Muñoz’ film ‘Marche Salomon’ (2015), the viewer is coaxed into a mental and physical undisciplining: the film is an act of wilful disobedience against how capitalism orders you to look, think and feel. The camera follows a young boy, played by Marcelin Exiliere, as he walks around the market where he works. He cuts up parts of an animal – presumably a goat – with a large knife, and then approaches a young girl (Mardcholene Chevry), who also works in the market, and the two converse. Their market is also a ‘galaxy’, where everything is ‘dead’ – “this goat is dead” and “this pig is dead” – but here, too, are spirits, zombies, the divine, present in everything from mass-produced bottles and other commodities to toxic rivers and beheaded animals. The boy holds a beaded object above his head, both of them follow it with their eyes. They insist at the end of the film that “if you look beyond these things, there is something else, look, look” — “if you look through here, you see something else, look, look here, look.” What is that something else? Is it a world without capitalism, in which racial exploitation and expropriation is not the central political grammar? How can we get there?
Muñoz has stated that she wants her films to undo certain kinds of thinking: “Undo thinking like a drone, undo thinking like a machine, undo thinking like a person that builds a military dock. To get to that other place.”13 Her films are visualisations of that other place, existing within the world we have now, made tangible through filmic experiments with light, words, objects and the varied belief systems of the Caribbean. Hers is the project of unearthing a potential world, or potential history, rooted within the one we currently live.
Gazelle Mba is a writer, researcher and editor.
1. Rafael Bernal, ‘Puerto Rico governor asks Trump to consider statehood’, The Hill, September 2018 [accessed February 2020]. 2. Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Sociedad de Tiempo Libre, [accessed January 2020] 3. Catalina Lozano, ‘Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’, Terremoto, August 2015, [accessed 13 February 2020] 4. Karen Barad, ‘On Touching: The Inhuman That Therefore I Am’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Vol. 25, Issue 3, Durham: Duke University Press, 2012, pp. 206–223. [accessed February 2019] 5. Audre Lorde, ‘Poetry Is Not a Luxury’, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, London: Penguin Books, 2019, p. 56. 6. Translations have been added for clarity. Even when Muñoz’s work is shown in the Anglophone world, the titles are nearly always kept in their original Spanish. 7. ‘Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’, Sociedad de Tiempo Libre [accessed 28 January 2020]. 8. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1963, p. 255. 9. Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional, ‘Unnamed Communique’, Latin American Studies, February 1982, [accessed February 2020]. 10. Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken, Spirit Possession in French, Haitian and Voudou Thought: An Intellectual History, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015, p. 100. 11. Silvia Federici, Caliban and The Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2014, p. 141. 12. Ibid. 13. Ionit Behar, ‘Beyond Beauty: Beatriz Santiago Muñoz On How To Truly Perceive A Place’ Art Slant, April 2016, [accessed February 2020].
