MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | ’COMPARISON’ AS A MODE OF INQUIRY IN THE POST-COMPARATIVE WORLD

Being Ready for What You Don't Know: Beatriz Santiago Muñoz' Wandering, Brown Cinema

APRIL 25 @ 6 P.M. | Daniel Family Commons, Usdan University Center

The Caribbean sea is spectrum blue; a Beaulieu 16mm camera looks out from the dock of a dilapidated former U.S. naval base in Ceiba, on "the Big Island," to Vieques, "the small island," into the obstacle of a hand-made, and hand-held, origami mirror refracting the land-mine-ridden, and magical, island. Vieques multiplies from this point of view that refuses fixity. It changes shape, becomes a triangle with mystical power, becomes a plurality, something more than a place swollen with the living memory of explosions, rampant cancer, and death in those who lived during and since the decades of military weapons testing on the island.

A visual object that becomes a sonic, multi-sensory portal, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz's camera maneuvers viewers into collaborations with others who know how to survive the droughts of global capital. She has roamed to Chiapas, Port-au-Prince, Caxias do Sul, Mexico City, San Francisco, and Faslane, but her films are more often set in the rainforest, coasts, and former naval bases of Puerto Rico. These everyday Puerto Rican settings verge on the science fictional, where fishermen perform civil disobedience just by fishing, young boys appear out of the blue in the forest playing games where their land abuts the site of an anthropological dig, and a queer black healer speaks cures from the war machine and prison industrial complex from the perspective of an androgynous cat. This moving image fantasy sets free a body learning how to make a future with others by tripping with a living past rather than by excavating it, as though the dead were ever just dead. Through anti-proprietary and brown philosophical wandering, we can move from the position of being ready for what we don't know.

Still from Otros usos / 16mm silent film / RT 7.00 / Used with permission of artist, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, and Galería Agustina Ferreyra