"Being Ready for What you Don't Know": A Conversation with Beatriz Santiago Muñoz

beatriz santiago muñoz is a Puerto Rican, Antillean artist. A filmmaker and writer, she has made some fifteen films in rainforests, on small farms, along coasts, and on decommissioned U.S. Naval bases of Puerto Rico. After years of study at the University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she returned to live and work in Puerto Rico. She has continued to roam, making place-specific, clinamenic films and collaborating with other practitioners and artists in Chiapas, Caxias do Sul, Glasgow, San Francisco, Port-au-Prince, and elsewhere.

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz. Photograph by the artist.

In the summer of 2016, her solo show at the New Museum, That which identifies them like the eye of the Cyclops, featured two films—in digital and 16mm formats—as well as sculptures and masks, a large broadside text interview, and an archival space for reading and watching documentation relating to Monique Wittig, whose novelistic and poetic fantasy Les Guérillères (1969) was a partial inspiration for the show, and the source of its title.¹ Earlier in 2016, María Elena Ortiz beautifully curated the exhibition A Universe of Fragile Mirrors at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), the title of which comes from an interview with the French ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch. The show generated a book by the same name. Far from a mere collection of still images, it is a book with a compelling design containing text, visuals—including selections that meditate on military photography's afterlives, rituals, and almost-films—and invocations of sound experiments done on U.S. Naval bases in and around the making of several films.²

Santiago Muñoz is also a cofounder of the San Juan-based independent art space, Beta-Local. Since stepping down as a codirector, she has organized the seminario itinerante [itinerant seminar] in relation to Beta-Local. The itinerant seminar is a cohabitational and collaborative art-making, theorizing, and movement practice. The seminar also involves walking for miles as well as camping, cooking, sharing resources, and sleeping outside as a group. In the summer of 2015, I participated in the itinerant seminar in Vieques with Santiago Muñoz and about twenty other artists and writers. And again, in the summer of 2017, I returned to Vieques and participated with a smaller group, some of us returning to continue specific projects begun two years before. This detail of my participation in the itinerant seminars is relevant to my proximity to the subject of this interview, and our discussions of what I imagine as sensorial and slow errancy.

Slow, sensorial errancy is crucial to how Santiago Muñoz's cinema imaginatively materializes lost and diasporic archives of insurgency against U.S. claims to violent sovereignty in Puerto Rico. It is also central to the organization of the itinerant seminars, which practice errancy not only by walking, but also through sensorial reorientations—visceral perceptive adjustments that come from slowly moving through spaces overdetermined by colonial narratives. In a place where the ocean floors and public beaches hold traces of U.S. Naval invasion, where beaches are increasingly privatized for corporatized tourism, and where the local government recently made camping illegal in some public spaces as a strategy for controlling prolonged public protests, the itinerant seminars enact corporeal, sensorial, cohabitational, and aesthetic refusals of the claims of laws invented and enforced in foreign interests. Ideas flare in this interview's imaginary about forms of aesthetic militancy that fire deviant possibilities, such as collaboration, friendship, mutual aid, and listening to places. While masculinist lines of reason and masterful fantasies of universal critical distance still loaf around the halls of Academe, the flows of my and Beatriz's lines of conversation move otherwise in this interview: friendship is not an enabling force, and certainly not a simplifying force.³ The geographical, aesthetic, and historical forces that shape our friendship place another kind of pressure on how we enact(ed) this...