Marché Salomon depicts two meat vendors, a young man and woman, chatting in Marché Salomon, a busy Port-au-Prince market. Amongst the surrounding bustle, the two have an unsentimental discussion about the mystical qualities of common products sold at the market, wondering whether the divine can inhabit any kind of object – mass produced bottles, toxic rivers, beheaded goats. Their musings weave together the cosmic and the mundane, with the work of butchering a goat and the characters of the market serving as existential metaphors for the universe, time travel, ghosts, and death. The young man observes, “The meat sellers, they are the sun, each time they cut a piece of meat, energy flies around the universe. With all of the flies, the women, all of the vegetables, they are the planets.” One might understand the film as a series of open-ended questions: What things and places do we consider sacred? Who dictates our understanding of the universe? Might we be able to uncover the seemingly unreachable distance of the cosmos in the banality of everyday life? As in her other works, Marché Salomon seamlessly blends documentary and cinematic styles to convey the deep tension that exists between the mythologized history of a colonised land and the seemingly innocuous passing of time in the present, ultimately conveying a haunting unease.

Haitian Kréyol spoken, English subtitles

The Head that Killed Everyone is a mixing of indigenous mythologies with present-day characters, geographies, and culture in Puerto Rico. The title refers to how a shooting star was (in local mythology) interpreted as a head without a body, crossing the sky, signalling the arrival of chaos and destruction. Cats are very common on the island of Puerto Rico, and in this video, the cat is cast as a mythological entity, capable of world-altering transformations. The soundtrack further blends time and space as it alternates between a track from the Peruvian punk band, Los Psychos, and the chirping and croaking music of the coquí frog that populate Puerto Rico’s wet landscapes. These elements combine to imagine a spell that can destroy military industries, confronting the complexities of this system on a poetic plane rather than a rational one.

Spanish spoken, English subtitles

On 20 September 2017, one of the most violent storms ever to hit the Caribbean made landfall on the island of Puerto Rico. The storm, the likes of which Puerto Ricans had never experienced, gathered in intensity before tearing through the Dominican Republic and the U.S. Virgin Islands, ending in Puerto Rico. Those who survived the storm-hell were bound to the hell of its aftermath. In Santiago Muñoz’s observational style, Gosila documents the upended and devastated landscape after the hurricane, and the slow and endless work of clearing debris, water-filled roads, and unbridled nature. The title refers to the cult film Godzilla (1954), where a sea creature turned terrestrial monster destroys the island of Odo and then Tokyo. Gosila is a film about disorder, sense-making from the ground up, slowness, and the work-days after the hurricane.

Spanish spoken, English subtitles

In Otros Usos, Santiago Muñoz trains her lens on the grounds of Roosevelt Roads, a former U.S. Naval base in Ceiba, Puerto Rico that was a frequent target of local protests against military presence until its ultimate decommission in 2004. The site’s docks, still fitted with abandoned military equipment and infrastructure, jut out into the ocean and are now utilised by local fishermen. At varying intervals, the scenic images become unfixed, mirroring or multiplying inversely within the frame. Santiago Muñoz shot the film through reflective glass sculptures of her own making, creating alternating, kaleidoscope-like views of sea, sun, land, sky, and figure. Using her camera as a tool, the artist both distorts and augments our experience of place, thus blurring the borders between historical fact and fiction. 

La Cueva Negra explores the Paso del Indio, an indigenous burial ground in Puerto Rico that was discovered during the construction of a highway, and eventually paved over. Drawing on interviews with local residents and with archaeologists involved in the excavation, Santiago Muñoz’s video offers a reflection on the origins and meanings of the site, which becomes in the process an allegory for the island’s convoluted history. The project starts from the site’s material history, the recollections of the workers and archaeologists involved, what we know, and what we think we know about a landscape and how these layers of material and belief interact to create a new contemporary cosmogony, one built on the trash, the graffiti, the expressway, the river, the village, the karst bedrock and the traces of previous inhabitants’ worldview. The camera tracks two teenage boys wandering through the area, their freedom of movement and sense of curiosity symbolising the romantic but ultimately misguided desire to find and preserve paradise.

Spanish spoken, English subtitles