Artist-in-residence, Natalia Lassalle-Morillo screens her 4-channel film Foreign in a Domestic Sense, the first in an anthology of film and performance works that investigate how to relate to and reimagine land, history, and mythology from a distance. Conjured together with Sofía Gallisá Muriente, the film is a constellation of testimonies and imaginaries of Puerto Ricans who have migrated to Central Florida in recent years and is a prelude to En Parábola, her current New York-focused project. Foreign in a Domestic Sense evokes, accompanies, and connects the lived experiences of people who are part of the fastest-growing Puerto Rican population in the United States. The film speculates on how community is created through recreation and how cultural hybridity signals to the future.

After the screening, Natalia engages in an open dialogue with curator Ali Rosa-Salas about her efforts to create a new archive of Puerto Rican myths. Together with her current conversation partners, they reflect on how migration has shaped perceptions of memory and history in Puerto Rico and the diaspora, and look at how Natalia’s current method of collective rehearsal and filmmaking processes with collaborators residing on the Puerto Rican archipelago and within the diasporic communities in New York City could help in reimagining decolonization processes beyond political discourse, as transformative processes that include our consciousness, bodies, collective memory, and all that is intangible.

This event is part of For Your Reference a series in which our New York Studio & Research residents present a single reference (whether a film, a word, a historic occurrence, a plant, a concept, a person…) and then take their time to unpack it through conversation with the audience.

Image: The New York and Puerto Rico Steamship Company map (reference image). The company’s ships traveled between San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Pier 35, Atlantic Basin in Red Hook. While most of these ships took vacationers to Puerto Rico, their lasting effect was transporting Puerto Rican migrants to Red Hook in Brooklyn, where they established a community near the docks at Atlantic Basin.