17 July: Open Air screening Safehouse [A side, B side] by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
- Published on Wednesday, 14 July 2021 13:26
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Safehouse [A side, B side] (film still), 2018. Courtesy of the artist.
Open Air screening Safehouse [A side, B side] by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
Saturday, 17 July, 11 pm
Nida Art Colony of the Vilnius Academy of Arts
E. A. Jonušo str. 3
Nida LT-93127
A Side: 10 minutes
B Side: 10 minutes
Actors: Pepe Álvarez, Joelle Mercedes, Kairiana Nuñez Santaliz
Location sound recording: Julian Flavin
Sound editing and additional sound recording: Joel Rodríguez, Sindhu Thirumalaisamya
2-channel HD video, colour, with sound
Three actors perform gestures that we could imagine might take place in a clandestine apartment. They listen to music, eat, and take pleasure in being by themselves. The performers are both themselves and imagined others—members of Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN), the Puerto Rican anti-colonial movement which was partly based in Chicago. As in many other works of Muñoz, Safehouse examines the material culture and sensorial unconscious of this movement, reformulating the constellation of ideas surrounding its history.
She places her fragmented narratives deliberately on the threshold between documentary and fiction and her camera makes itself present in the proximity of her subjects. While this brings attention to the performativity of the cinematic medium as a mediating instrument with social implications, the images also turn highly touchable and haptic.This hapticity, alongside the disjunction between words and images in the film, creates layers of ambiguity that illustrate the suppressed nature of FALN’s history: the desires, anxieties, and anticipations, which remain invisible, unsaid, and gone. As the performers in the film are listening to a recording and making a transcription, several narrators recount the theories and politics of the FLAN movement. One of the narrators asks: “How do we create a new language? It’s language that might allow us to have a different existence; just as one is inventing a new language, we’re also trying to create a new collective body, of another order.”
The open-air screening is part of the multi-chaptered program, Sensible Grounds, curated by Azar Mahmoudian with previous iterations Sensible Grounds: Tectonics of Camaraderie at MAAT and Rua das Gaivotas, Lisbon; Tensta Konsthal, Stockholm; and upcoming iterations at SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin; Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; and RCA London, among others (2018–2021). The programme at NAC is part of the project 4Cs: From Conflict to Conviviality through Creativity and Culture, a European Cooperation project, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the EU and the Lithuanian Council for Culture.
