Sofía Gallisá Muriente

Sofía Gallisá Muriente develops projects over long periods of time, through a process of exploration and dialogue with others: “I reject traditional hierarchical structures of filmmaking in favor of a practice that is intuitive and informed by collective creation and improvisation.” This way of working began as a teenager, when she toured Puerto Rico with a guerilla theatre group. Her work departs from formal and informal archives, field recordings, found materials, media created for mass consumption, oral history, and popular speculation; interrogating the production of images and historical narratives. Sofía uses text, image, and archive as medium and subject, exploring their poetic and political implications.

With her current projects, Sofía aims to reverse the flow of colonial processes through a confrontation with the dominant gaze. In Chiusure, she will work with materials gathered throughout her most recent period of research and filming as part of Observatorio de lagunas, a series of counter-memory works that address remembering and reimagining history in Puerto Rico by connecting dynamic coastal lagoon ecosystems with the absences in memory. The residency will provide space and time to deepen her studio practice, process footage and audio recordings, experiment with projections, read, write, edit and even practice other mediums outside of her comfort zone, like drawing with ink and watercolors made from minerals sourced from Puerto Rican soils by artist/friend Karla Claudio. The residency will also support two new collaborations that have emerged from this series, with Génesis Báez and with Natalia Lassalle-Morillo.

Stamps at the National Museum of Natural History’s Museum Support Center in Maryland, 2022. Photo by Sofía Gallisá Muriente.