The Elusive Allure of Beatriz Santiago Muñoz

Still from Oneiromancer (2017). Courtesy of the artist.

In a rare interview, the artist and filmmaker, whose visual work is known for its intersection of ethnography and cultural geography, gives us a glimpse into her process.  

One of the things that intrigue me the most about your work is that you present several universes that are within the social context we don’t usually have access to. They are unique stories where you dive in and present their raw reality. How do you manage to intertwine these worlds?
Well, I'm not sure if they are intertwined. [Laughs] The first time I saw all of my work together was in an exhibition at Siqueiros's Sala de Arte Público and I thought, "It's going to be a cacophony. It is not going to be understandable, all the projects have different contexts.” I was super worried. But, when I finally saw it all together I thought to myself, "Ah, yes, this is work done by the same person."

I have to step back and see [my work] from afar to be able to notice the patterns or complete ideas beyond what I have inside my head, there's the matter of the methods in using the camera in many different ways and not only to create images. When I worked in Matruya, I was doing Pharmacopoeia with Pablo Díaz Cuadrado. You can see a historical construction by looking at the species in the same way that you scour through the landscape and architecture. Everything is already shaped here. Puerto Rico is so transformed by human activity.

Do you think that’s one of the reasons why the flora here is so wild? 
What happens in Puerto Rico is that the processes of colonization, industrialization, monocrop farming and all of that have drastically transformed it. When you're at Paso del Indio*, where I shot La Cueva Negra (The Black Cave)**, it looks like a forest that has been there forever. But really, it's land that was cleared around 30 years ago and now only almond and meaíto*** trees grow there. You can identify the historical moment and context if you know how to read the combination of trees, the location, and take note of the fact that you are under a bridge. 

For example, the Astral Pines that one sees in Condado**** and on many of beaches in Puerto Rico were planted by the US forest service in the 1940s— they were giving them away to reforest the land. So when you see that, you are looking at places where people used that “gift” as much as possible. Another thing I learned while filming Farmaceopea was that the Hippomane Mancinella is a poisonous apple, colloquially called "The Little Apple of Death", and which used to cover the entire coast of Puerto Rico. The [Taíno Indian] inhabitants of Puerto Rico coated their arrows with it, so the Spanish conquistadors ordered that it be eradicated from the island. It can still be found in [the beach areas of] Punta Soldado, Mona, Vieques and Culebra however.

In order to find it, I had to call the Park Ranger in Guánica who had been there working for thirty years. At first he told me that there weren't any, but then he called me back and said, "Yes, there's one. I'll take you." There is a single one he found a few years ago; he was supposed to cut it but didn't. There is also something to be inferred from the absence of the trees on the coasts. As wild as a place may seem now, you should know that there has been a transformation of the land away from a plant that was deemed too poisonous and aggressive for the people who arrived here. 

Do you think that nature put that tree there for some reason?
Yes, and when you start to find out about the properties of plants, you realize that almost all plants and trees have something that is going to be poisonous and will hurt you. This one is very, very poisonous to humans. Supposedly, if you lay down under a Little Apple of Death tree and it rains—you die. At minimum, you'll end up with some pretty wild burns on your body.

Did you get close to it?
Yes, but I didn’t touch it.

How do you conceptualize?
In his texts, Robert Smithson would do something similar [to what I do] He would pay close attention and then describe using formal and sensorial terms a particular place that we don't usually think of in such a way. How is the place formally organized? What are its sensorial elements?

For example, if we were to describe this place [where we are] in terms of the materials and forms that shape it, not necessarily as architecture, but as nature, suddenly you’d see things in a different way. Farmacopea, La Cueva Negra, Matrulla, and all those Post Military Cinema projects I filmed in Ceiba are moments where I was trying to see through a structure in the same way you would describe film as if it were a forest. What are these elements? What do you see?

Instead of seeing ruins, and this is something that I'm interested in, but, I am not interested in the fetishism of ruins, I envision how you can see a place— like a former military space that is falling apart—and envision it becoming something else instead of looking at it as a ruin of its past. This way you can also see it as “the forest in formation”. How do you see the future? By shifting from seeing nostalgia in the ruins to how you actually should. 

When you go to Ceiba’s Roosevelt Roads [an abandoned US military base], the ghosts of the military are very powerful. It is almost as if they are playing a violin next to your skin. It makes you think in a particular way; it’s as if you have a soundtrack forcing you to have an emotional experience.

There are several energy portals in Puerto Rico. You go somewhere and the energy shifts immediately. That violin you mentioned starts creeping in very, very slowly... [both laugh] There are also places that are stuck in time and make you think, “Am I in 1987, 1993 or 2006? 
Yes! I think it's because of the formats, structures and what we also think of as nature. But it's also organized in a particular way that acts upon us in the same way that a movie does. It manipulates you, pulls you in and makes you think in certain ways. Ruins are a very powerful in Puerto Rico. If you think about it in a nostalgic way, it will drain you and you’ll end up in a black hole where you are constantly repeating the moment, the event.

There’s something visually powerful about being in Ceiba [at the Roosevelt Roads Naval Station, a former United States naval base in the northeast of Puerto Rico] . At first when you’re in the ruins, you think that you are in complete silence and nothing is happening. But once you turn on the recorder, you start listening and the decibels are out of control—there are actually a lot of crickets and birds all chirping at the same time. There is a mental trick from the military’s past, they want you to believe that there is nothing happening and that it’s completely empty; but in reality, the moment they left, the opposite happened.

The artist, photographed by Sofía Mercedes Hernández.

What leads to this obsession with nature?
Not all of my projects are about nature. Up to a certain moment of my life I used to think, "Oh, a tree is just a tree...” I also did not know about [specific] species either. I was a city kid who didn't give a fuck about the natural world. These are things I’ve been teaching myself. 

There are also my other projects that have nothing to do with it. You look back and suddenly realize, "I already did a project about Elizam, one about Carlos Irizarry, one about Pablo Diaz Cuadrado" [all three were political prisoners] and even though they are all different, together they create a specific vision of a generation.

I cannot say that all my work has to do with the issues of [a particular] place or landscape either. I think I came to that because I was interested in the dynamics of the post-military space, and I got myself there in trying to make artwork. 

How did you end up investigating socially focused issues?
I'm not really sure that I think in thematic terms like that. I am very interested in the relationship between politics and aesthetics, and how we can think through forms. For example, I’ve always been obsessed with questions about political definitions and utopias— the ideas of imagining another kind of world. I am interested in thinking about it in terms of "what if you abandon the preconceived definitions we have through language".

I start thinking about political relationships through affective relationships. There is a project that I am trying to develop now, and it's really hard to think about it, but I know that I have to force myself to think of it in this way: about the sensory unconscious of the pro-independence movement in different places. I am not interested in thinking through the actual political statement, nor through the abstract idea of ​​liberation, nor the abstract idea of a ​​nation—which is what happens among a certain group of people. Rather, I am interested in the spaces they inhabit, their conversations, the way they talk, what they want or don’t want.

But this happens in every kind of social circle.
Of course, but what interests me right now is: What is the formal sensorial unconscious that produces the possibility of thinking about the idea of ​​liberation in a group of people? I'm not sure how I'm going to sit down with people who participated in covert operations thirty years ago. That's why I don't like doing interviews. When you ask something, you are already there in that "let's talk about political processes through words" mode.

Think about it. How do I manage to talk to someone about how they sat next to a certain person, how they talked to each other, where would they meet? The reality is that maybe this is something that you can’t really measure in words because these people have not thought about these things in a long time. 

It’s as if I had to describe to someone how my sensorial life was when I was six years old. Where do you start? What would you describe? That’s when, in reality, you start to become a person with feelings and emotions. For example, if you told me about the women who raised you and that they are in a category by themselves, at the end of the day, I would have to ask you, “What did you feel? What did that mean to you? How did they speak to you? How did they touch you?” Imagine being asked all of these things... 

I felt overprotected. Sometimes I was uncomfortable, but there was always a weird reassurance that everything would turn out fine. 
All of these things shape you as a person and it makes you think, act and move in certain ways. In order to talk about all of that, we would have to start with an analytical process and even think about how your body felt. What was your relationship with these people? Where did you used to sit down?

As a child, I remember spending hours sitting in a particular way on the floor playing and reading. The thing that I remember most is how the floor felt against my thighs. These are things that you would think, “oh, they have no meaning" but, yes, they do. Can you imagine sitting down to talk to people that were part of the liberation movement and yet you can’t really talk to them? You know? In terms of feeling like you are part of them.

I think my way of going from one idea to another is, "I am interested in this and that subject". Or if not, "I am interested in some abstract ideas". I am interested in reaching the sensorial unconscious of these questions and I know that to get there I need to have other processes: I place a camera in the middle of a space and I have to dance with someone or lie in their bed. I have to do a lot of things other than just talking.

Do you use all of these sounds to work on your piece?
Yes.

And this is not a short process. You spend days, hours... it's a meticulous discipline, you can't rush it. Do you communicate this languid process in your videos?
Yes, but what happens with my work right now is there are two things going on at the same time: one is what happens during the moment when we are filming. I think that what happens in the process of making films is very important. And secondly, there are also the other formal and sensorial issues to take into account there. Once it’s done, the film is shown inside an exhibition space that has a very particular format which comes from a traditional way of thinking art as an autonomous object. It's right there where my work becomes conflictive.

How?
Every time I talk about this, if it's with a group of intelligent people, they ask me the same question because they think about political and aesthetic relationships. The question is, "What do you think about when you're doing all of this?" I can’t really answer that. It's very difficult to transmit all this information in a video projection. Where is it? How can we understand the whole context? And I know that my work has a feeling of absence due to this. But I don't think that problem has a solution in my work. I think maybe at times it should have that feeling, be inexplicable, and it should be like a dark object that you do not fully understand.

That way no one gets it. 
Exactly. It has to feel like something you don’t understand; because if it were all out in the open, it would be as if I could transmit the sensorial context as well—and that’s impossible. But I don't know if this is a good answer. I also don’t know if this is something I’m constantly working on. I think you leave some things behind along the way.

My film education is in the western tradition. My work engages with Chantal Ackerman’s and other contemporary artists who gravitate in the context where films becomes an autonomous object. Once projected in a gallery’s wall, my work is also doing other things and it does not necessarily have to do with the things that occur when I'm filming them. Each context works in a different way.

This is a challenge.
Yes. For me, it’s really difficult during the moment of transformation that happens when my work is presented. Also, although my work is not exhibited here in Puerto Rico, it’s created here. That’s why I have to pay so much attention to the process of working on it. Because if this is the only document of where the work is created, I have to pay more attention to that, rather than to it when it’s presented in front of an audience.

Shouldn't reaching the audience be the least of your worries?
It is until I am standing in front of an audience and telling them, "all of this is important for me in the process". But, what role do I play in this encounter? Between the image and them? I know about the process to get to the image, and all that thought behind it, but then there is another group of people who don't give... 

A flying fuck...
A flying fuck! [Both laugh] They do not care about your "clinical" process, the philosophical process behind it — the process of formation and transformation of subjectivity through the sensorial. What they usually ask is, what can I get from this? It's right then that you see that art education is insufficient, because the only thing that trains you for a question like this is interacting with the audience. 

When I'm working on a project I'm not thinking about its meaning. I am not thinking about transmission, its message or about communication. I reject that way of thinking about art. I think that art has many other functions that are not just the creation of meaning. For example, What is the meaning of clouds? I don't know! I do have an experience with them but they are not trying to tell me anything.

Do you consider yourself a researcher?
I have a problem with the word research because it is used a lot in the military and academia. In research, you tend know what you're looking for and I don't know what I'm looking for ahead of time. I start a process of encounter that can bear its fruit— or not! But, the point is, I don't know and I don't like to think about it that way. In that way I’m a bit more of a hippie. [Laughs]

Are you still interested in the subjects of magic and the occult?
Well, not in a specific way per se. But yes, I am very interested in it because they are other systems of thought that teach you something. It's like seeing another language and thinking, "Ah! You do not always have to use this structure to understand the world." There is something about spells that I really like; they're not ‘get out of jail free cards’. Nothing comes for free. It's not like, "I want this person to love me, so I'll do it the easy way... Getting them to love me is difficult so I'm just going to do some magic to get it."  No! It's not like that. In order to find love and to make it work, that spell will require you to do a job that is equivalent in effort. What happens is that this “road” is inaccessible for some reason. So you have to look for something specific, and inhabit it. You have to do the symbolic work from another direction. It is like saying, "another road is open and it is the symbolic way."

I very much like that ritual thinking and religious thought. It is tightly connected to material objects. You look for specific trinkets and a particular color. It may be irrational, but when you listen, it works just like politics on totally irrational terms. Ever since you were a child the shaping of subjectivity is irrational. You do not learn order or language rationally. One learns through the senses, affections and pain. And then it makes sense to open those roads if one is working with all that and not only the ways of analysis or criticism or disciplinary thinking.

Do you think your art engenders changes?
What the fuck is art? Artists cannot change the world with weapons, nor can we change it through logic and we cannot change it rationally. But we can change it through another means: the symbolic, through sensorial information. The rational and technocratic worlds have abandoned the sensorial, but we still have it. We can work from there.

There is something that happens in the clinical process of psychoanalysis and which is the same thing that interests me in the encounter between process and work. It has to do with accessing the unconscious and looking at processes of the formation of subjectivity. But, the thing with psychoanalysis is that everything is done through language. The subconscious is structured like language and everything is done via verbal language. I've had experiences where you do not share a single word and yet there are many things happening. That’s something I'm interested in thinking about.

FOOTNOTES

* Paseo del Indio is a former archeological and indigenous burial site.

** La Cueva Negra is based on the indigenous burial site and former archaeological dig site Paso Del Indio where she explores the passage of time and symbolic history of such a site—whose existence was discovered in the course of the construction of a new highway.

***Spathodea campanulata, also known as the African Tulip tree.

**** Condado is a tourist and upper class residential area of San Juan.