Beatriz Santiago Muñoz: ‘Destroy the Order Around You’

This piece appears in the columns section of frieze 248, ‘Disobedience’

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s moving-image practice creates new worlds that offer opportunities for collective re-thinking – not just for the subjects of her work, but for those participating in its production. Whether speculative, as in her feature Oriana (2022), which resets Monique Wittig’s canonical feminist novel Les Guérillères (1969) to Puerto Rico, or more recognizably concerned with the everyday, as in Marché Salomon (2015), shot in a bustling market in Port-au-Prince, hierarchies and roles are redrawn. Santiago Muñoz and I met to discuss political militancy and disobedience, theatre and cinema, and approaches to moving-image work. The conversation has been edited for clarity.  – Andreas Petrossiants

Andreas Petrossiants  You’ve said that your work is not so much about San Juan as it is about thinking with San Juan. You’ve also remarked that your works whisper to each other. These sentiments are useful when considering all forms of social practice.

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz  When I returned to Puerto Rico after attending graduate school in the US, I realized that nothing I had learned there was applicable here. Approaches to history, institutions, ways of working, even the expectations of what an artwork is, were all different in this context. In San Juan, this quickly became apparent because there is a kind of constant, everyday performance going on. There are various things to pay attention to when people perform actions in public that are typically done in private, suggesting alternative ways of thinking.

AP It’s an attention to the ‘everyday’, which Kristin Ross, in The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life [2023], describes as a place of alienation and, simultaneously, where a person or a group can break that alienation. You work with several different types of people that change and produce space, including activists and healers, young students and former political prisoners, butchers and artists. What’s your approach to those collaborations?

BSM That one is a little difficult to answer because I don’t think of myself as a ‘collaborator’. For me, collaboration implies thinking together throughout the whole process of making something. There are people that I’ve collaborated with, sure. But then there are people that have appeared in my work, or that I’ve made things with, who I’ve known for a long time. For example, Elizam Escobar was a political prisoner who spent 19 years incarcerated in the US. I met him when he was still in prison, while I was working as a Spanish-language interpreter for a professor of mine making a documentary about him. The conversation was about the relationship between politics and art, because he was an artist and poet.

Many years later, Elizam came to lecture at the art school where I was teaching, and we became friends. I wanted to make something with him about how his political thinking was transformed by the places and landscapes he had been. By the time I proposed this to him, we had already been friends for 15 years! He was very committed to an idea of art as something that is free of outside intervention. For this reason, he would not ‘collaborate’ with me. He told me: ‘It’s your work; it’s all you. You make the decisions and tell me what to do. I am your body to move around.’ If I asked for his input, he would insist that every decision was mine to make. He was resistant to having any part of his subjectivity be a part of the work’s conception.

AP When I heard that the theme for this section of the magazine was ‘disobedience’, I immediately thought of the work you made with Escobar [Prisoner’s Cinema, 2013]. In it, we hear him narrate his prison diaries and see him in his home, but it’s also interspersed with images from the island – of container ships which import the violence of globalized capitalist logistics, for example. While the ships pass, Escobar speaks about his rejection of the legitimacy of Yankee courts.

BSM Lately, I have been considering how to get out of a structure in which I am forced to make sense. So, I’ve been thinking about the ways in which 20th century Caribbean poetry did a lot of work around nonsense. There’s [also] a beautiful essay [about Peruvian poetry] by José Carlos Mariátegui in defence of pure nonsense [‘Defensa del disparate puro’, 1928]. I guess it’s very dadaist in a way: destroying the order around you, clearing a path so that other kinds of relationships between objects, ideas and places can happen. I don’t know how I got there from your question but there was something.

AP Well, maybe one connection is that Mariátegui had quite a formalist Marxist approach to the history of capitalist and colonial development. And, from what you’re saying, Escobar similarly believed that artistic production could provide a space of autonomy.

BSM Right! In a way, Elizam saved all his disordered thinking for the art space and drew a sharp line between artistic and political work – as well as between art and solidarity, ethics or discipline. We talked about that all the time; it was fun to ask him why he kept up that wall.

AP Is there something disobedient about breaking apart that boundary between art and politics?

BSM I don’t think about it in those terms. In some ways, I’m with Elizam in the sense that I have a kind of political participation as a citizen, and as a person in different political groupings, which I keep separate from my artwork. It’s the same with pedagogy. In part, this is because there are ideas of authorship so embedded in art-making that, as much as you might want to avoid them, you can’t fully. To do so, we’d have to completely remake epistemic structures, which is incredibly hard.

AP That’s what I take from Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s idea of the need to become ‘incomplete’ [All Incomplete, 2021]: their notion that the myth of individuality is a tool of political separation and that artistic production is fundamentally a collective process.

BSM Even though the art world asks for autonomous works, it’s impossible for me to think about each piece I make in that way. I only understand the work in relationship to others.

AP Speaking of pedagogy, you’ve mentioned Brazilian theatre practitioner Augusto Boal as one of your influences.

BSM That comes from when I was in my early 20s and was really interested in theatre and performance. I was attracted to Boal’s idea of both performers and audience having a choice about whether and how to intervene in what is happening. It’s also beautiful in terms of thinking about liveness: anybody who is present during the performance can change the space. 

AP What is your relationship to radical filmmaking practices, such as cinéma vérité and neorealism?

BSM Sarah Maldoror and Sara Gómez are two filmmakers that really influenced me. In particular, Maldoror’s Sambizanga [1972] made me realize that film didn’t have to be just representational but could be a practice. And that has practical applications for everybody involved with the film. Oriana was the longest, most complicated film I had ever made, but the crew was small. When we were shooting in Puerto Rico, there were seven people behind the camera and another seven in front of the camera, which required us to work together in ways that many people weren’t used to. Someone who usually just operated the camera also had to cook and make the fire.

AP This makes me think of José Muñoz’s writing on the power of performative social practices to actualize new worlds. I see this type of radical utopian thinking in your work Fábrica Inútil [Useless Factory, 2002], for which you restaged events that followed layoffs at a factory in Puerto Rico. But you chose to depict workers sharing in moments of collective joy outside the space/time of production – dancing, looking at a sunset, cracking jokes.

BSM I enjoyed making that work. For one of the scenes, I asked the actual managers at the factory to perform the speech that they would give if they had to lay people off. It was the moment when the workers realized that the managers really knew how to give this speech and how to transmit the feeling of being emotionally affected. Two women started crying. The performed earnestness of the managers really affected them, and they began asking genuine questions like: ‘Can we create a kind of worker ownership model here?’.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 248 with the headline ‘Against Intervention’

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s ‘Elogio al Disparate’ is on view at secession, Vienna until 23 February

^{Main image: Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Oenanthe (detail), 2023, video still. Courtesy: the artist}