Sofía Gallisá Muriente & Natalia Lassalle-Morillo
Foreign in a Domestic Sense

From February 8 to March 30, 2024
Opening on February 8 at 6 pm
— Facebook event

Foreign in a Domestic Sense refers to the oxymoron used by the United States Supreme Court in 1901 as part of the ruling sanction to US colonization identifying Puerto Rico as an “unincorporated possession”. Speaking to this unique and strange relationship, the artists depict the fragmentary, non-linearity, and essentially foreign feeling of diaspora memory. Born out of a desire to get closer to and spend time with Florida’s Puerto Rican community, the film’s four screens interweave testimonies and imaginaries through different visual genres and narrative approaches. The result is a four-channel speculative documentary on the entanglement of climate grief and human displacement. Video and Super8 images of Walt Disney World and NASA space shuttles evoke a paired concept of time and travel, while repeated depictions of water — swamplands, Florida’s rising sea levels, and Hurricane Maria — contemplate future and survival. 

Gallisá Muriente and Lassalle-Morillo respond to this ambient anxiety in a layered visual exploration of the hybridized yet somehow restorative languages, memories, and experiences emerging out of the rapidly expanding population displaced from the archipelago by political and environmental disaster. Portraits of Puerto Rican cuisine, music, work, and recreation build a sense of home away from home, however temporary or precarious. In an attempt to move beyond disaster porn and commodified grief, the artists wonder how to move freely and safely – referring to both migratory movements across land and water, or to the movement of the body itself. Here, the dancefloor, staged or documented, is emblemized as a site where the collective exploration of possible liberation is practiced, while the meaning of community and nation is evolved and reorganized. 

Sofía Gallisá Muriente is an artist whose practice resists colonial erasures and claims the freedom of historical agency, proposing mechanisms for remembering and reimagining. Her work deepens the subjectivity of historical narratives and contests dominant visual culture through long periods of research and multiple approaches to documentation. She employs text, image, and archive as medium and subject, exploring their poetic and political implications. 

Gallisá Muriente has been a fellow of the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, DC), Cisneros Institute at MoMA and the Flaherty Seminar (New York), Puerto Rican Arts Initiative (San Juan), Annenberg Innovation Lab at USC (Los Angeles); and participated in residencies with the Vieques Historical Archives (Florida), Alice Yard (Trinidad and Tobago), FAARA residency (Uruguay), and Fonderie Darling (Montréal), among others. She has exhibited in documenta fifteen and at SAAVY Contemporary (Germany), the MoMA, Whitney Museum, and Queens Museum (New York), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, as well as at the galleries Km 0.2 and Embajada (Puerto Rico). From 2014 to 2020, she co-directed the artist-run organization Beta-Local (Puerto Rico). In 2023 she was awarded the Latinx Artist Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Melding intuitive experimental ethnography, theatrical performance, and collaborations with non-professional performers, Natalia Lassalle-Morillo’s practice centers on excavating imagined and archived history, decentralizing canonical narratives through embodied reenactments, and challenging written history by foregrounding the creation of new mythologies. Her multi-platform projects explore familial and citizen relationships in the context of Caribbean colonial history and the resulting imperialist oppression that has altered generations of material and spiritual trajectories. 

Lassalle-Morillo has participated in artist fellowships and residencies at the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, DC), Pioneer Works and Amant Studio & Research Residency Program (New York), and Fonderie Darling (Montréal). Her work is part of the KADIST collection, and she has exhibited in the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), Tenerife Espacio de las Artes (Spain), Seoul Museum of Art (South Korea), Walt Disney Modular Theater (California), among other. She recently presented her work at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (Puerto Rico) and at the 22nd Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil, and will soon take part in exhibitions at Amant and Cooper Hewitt (New York). She has taught film and interdisciplinary performance at Bard Microcollege (New York), CalArts (California), and MICA (Maryland).