Paradise in Ruins
April 10–10, 2022
6:30pm
"Celaje (Cloudscape) oscillates between chronicle, dream and document; using nature's time to interpret human cycles. Combining images filmed on 16mm and Super8, home movies, a found quarter-inch audio tape, old and hand-developed film, and an original score by José Iván Lebrón Moreira, the essay film is an elegy to the death of the Puerto Rican colonial project and the sedimentation of disasters in this Caribbean island. Memories move around like clouds, images rot and age, and the traces of the process are visible on the film and in the country, like ghosts." —SGM
Co-presented with Metrograph Presented as part of Unraveling Paradise, curated by Dessane Lopez Cassell.
Celaje (Cloudscape). 2020. Dir. Sofía Gallisá Muriente. USA (Puerto Rico). 41 mins. Screening followed by a Q&A with Sofía Gallisá Muriente
ABOUT
Sofía Gallisá Muriente (b. 1986, Puerto Rico) is a visual artist whose work resists colonial forces of erasure and claims the freedom of historical agency, generating mechanisms for remembering and reimagining. Her pieces employ text, image and archive as medium and subject, exploring their poetic and political implications. She earned a BFA in Film & TV Production and Latin American Studies at New York University (2008) and has participated in experimental pedagogical platforms led by artists, like Anhoek School and Beta-Local’s La Práctica, substituting graduate studies with a collaborative process of learning and unlearning. She has been a fellow of the Flaherty Seminar and the Smithsonian Institute, as well as participating in international residencies such as Alice Yard (Trinidad & Tobago), FAARA (Uruguay) and Fonderie Darling (Montreal). Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Art in America, Terremoto, Hyperallergic and other publications. She has exhibited in the Whitney Biennial, the Queens Museum, the Getty’s PST: LA/LA, ifa Galerie in Berlin, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico and CCA Glasgow, among others. From 2014 to 2020 she codirected of the artist-run, non-profit organization Beta-Local, dedicated to fostering knowledge exchange and transdisciplinary practices in Puerto Rico. She is currently a fellow of the Puerto Rican Arts Initiative and USC’s Annenberg Lab.