PROXYCO Gallery, 121 Orchard Street, New York, NY 10002
PROXYCO gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Sofia Gallisa Muriente: Unknown unknowns.
The very aspect of the frame reminds the spectator of the act of remembering; made of cut black cardboard, it imitates the characteristic frames of old photo albums. The shape of the frame, moreover, replicates the shape of the lagoon depicted in the photo: it is the Laguna Condado, in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The photo was made at night. Around the lagoon, more irregular than spectacular, the skyline of Condado. The lagoon is calm enough for its waters to reflect the luminous facades of the buildings. Mirages of progress and prosperity, a debt that accumulates, a promise turned real estate speculation. An intense red light stands out among the whites and yellows projected by the windows. It looks like an iris, an irritated or rather possessed eye that faces the spectator, as if it could return her gaze. Behind these towers, hidden on the left side of the building that watches like a Cyclops, stands a historic building: it is the General Archive of Puerto Rico, which holds the Film Collection of the Intelligence Division of the Puerto Rico Police, including the incompetent films made for the surveillance and espionage program and which Sofía Gallisá Muriente refashions here as a Tríptico de cine inútil (2023).
The photo of Laguna Condado serves as orientation for this exhibition: it signals the porous contiguity between lagoons and archives. All the pieces rehearse this idea—in Puerto Rico, the proximity between lagoons and archives is physical, morphological, epistemic, and even affective. Just as the matter that decomposes, accumulates, and sediments at the bottom of lagoons, archival objects decompose and deteriorate over time. As if to offer evidence of this ephemeral temporality, Fragmento (2023) focuses on a gloved hand displaying to the camera a small plastic bag containing a piece of document pocked by insects. The gesture of displaying this remnant questions both the ontology of the document and its efficacy in the archive (What is this unintelligible and destroyed piece of paper doing in the archive? What does this “document” document?). The observation of this record (observation is the method offered by lagoons as devices-for-remembrance) offers a possible answer: the holes evoke the voids, erasures, and silences—the gaps, las lagunas—inevitably present in capital “H” History and in the (imperial) Archive.
More Observatories, Less Laboratories
Their muddy bottoms, accumulations of layers and layers of organic and non-organic matter, lagoons are potentialized in Mueriente’s artistic practice as disobedient archives that help activate memory and stir the imagination. Because before memory and recollection, there is the desire to remember. And one cannot remember without imagining. This is one elemental lesson of Observatorio de lagunas (2021), the method devised by Sofía to politicize and poeticize the work of remembering in Puerto Rico.
How to go about the stories and experiences sedimented at the bottom of Laguna Anones, used as a firing range by the US Navy during the military occupation of Vieques (1941-2001)? Memory, an embodied practice, materializes in the lagoon-as-observatory as a desire that feeds on that which went (and keeps going) unnoticed, on errors, and even on unexpected drifts, effect of mental blocks or memory loss. At Anones lie sedimented stories of atomic destruction, territorial dispossession, varied forms of cancer, and chemo treatments that provoke memory loss and forgetfulness—that produce “chemo brains,” full of mental gaps (lagunas). How to mobilize that which because of colonial violence can no longer be remembered? To the destructive logic of the laboratory (Vieques as a field of atomic experimentation), Sofía opposes the observatory as a vulnerable space that takes the body in—the body as an unleashed archive, filled with poetic gaps, as a place where the effect of colonialism becomes evident and manifest both in how/what it remembers and how/what it forgets.
In this exhibition, Muriente offers lagoons as poetic-devices-for-remembrance, as embodied spaces that enable radically situated, organic and more-than-human (interspecies) ways of remembering. Take Guaniquilla luminosa (2023). An ancestral place located in Cabo Rojo, Laguna Guaniquilla is associated with the birth of the island of Puerto Rico. For Sofía, the origin myth, an opening, enables further fabulations. These images, captured with a Super8, were developed manually using water from the mountains of Jayuya. One can appreciate the agency of Jayuya—the remains of twigs, dry leaves, lint and dust particles present in the water invariably modify the documentary record, adding thickness, opacity and movement to the image. The film’s “errors,” effects of more-than-human arrangements, evoke the harmful effect of chemical agents on human, non-humans, and the land. Yet the sedimentary grammar characteristic of lagoons, which Sofía also turns into an image in Archivo sedimentario (2023), urges us to accumulate interpretations—to imagine further possible readings. For example: the haptic and almost delirious visuality of Guaniquilla luminosa as a visual poem about la desmemoria and its mental gaps, as a homage to those already-forgotten memories and those stories-yet/ever-to-be-known that continue to accumulate, to sediment persistently at the bottom of lagoons. - Ángeles Donoso Macaya
BIOGRAPHY
(b. 1986, San Juan, Puerto Rico)
Sofía Gallisá Muriente is a visual artist whose practice claims the freedom of historical agency, proposing mechanisms for remembering and reimagining. She employs text, image and archive as medium and subject, exploring their poetic and political implications. Sofía has been a fellow of the Cisneros Institute at MoMA, Smithsonian Institute, and Puerto Rican Arts Initiative. She has participated in artistic residencies with the Vieques Historical Archive (Puerto Rico), Alice Yard (Trinidad & Tobago), FAARA (Uruguay), Fonderie Darling (Montreal) and Amant (Italy), among others. Her work has been shown in Documenta Fifteen, MoMA, Whitney Museum, Savvy Contemporary, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, MoCA Taipei and galleries El Kilómetro and Embajada, among others. From 2014 to 2020, she co-directed the artist-run organization Beta-Local in San Juan. In 2023, she was awarded the Latinx Artist Fellowship and published the artist book Observatorio de lagunas: notas de campo with Editorial Educación Emergente. In 2024, she was awarded the United States Artist Fellowship.