Open Secret: Workshop with Sofía Gallisá Muriente

This workshop is interested in exploring the ways that art can be used to create documents that recombine and resignify histories. By collapsing time and distance, film and video open up possibilities that can be particularly useful to colonized and displaced people looking to produce counter narratives or to defy their erasure. The conversation is rooted in an experimental, politically implicated, research-based approach to camera, sound and editing. We will watch and discuss works that examine architectural and natural spaces, and the layers of history that inhabit them, exposing their poetic and political implications. Participants will analyze their formal approaches to identify practical ideas that can support their own projects. Strategies like artisanal film development, mixing formats, manipulating biodeterioration, and multi-channel installation will also be discussed as tools to explore presence, absence, impermanence, intertextuality, and memory work. The group will also be invited to go on a walk together and practice some of the ideas from the workshop with their cell phone cameras in a group exercise.

Biography
Sofía Gallisá Muriente is an artist whose research-based 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 multiple approaches to documentation. She employs text, image and archive as medium and subject, exploring their poetic and political implications.

Sofía has been a fellow of the Smithsonian Institute, Annenberg Media Lab at USC and the Flaherty Seminar, and participated in residencies such as Alice Yard (Trinidad & Tobago), FAARA (Uruguay) and Fonderie Darling (Montreal). She has exhibited in Documenta Fifteen, the Whitney Museum, the Queens Museum, ifa Galerie and Savvy Contemporary in Berlin, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, and galleries like Km 0.2 and Embajada. From 2014 to 2020, she co-directed the artist-run organization Beta-Local, dedicated to fostering knowledge exchange and transdisciplinary practices. She is currently a fellow of the Puerto Rican Arts Initiative and the Cisneros Institute at MoMA.

Open Secret is a series composed of screenings and workshops featuring the work of Parastoo Anoushahpour, Kriss Li, Sharlene Bamboat, and Sofía Gallisá Muriente. This series takes its departure from Fred Moten’s words that “poetry investigates new ways for people to get together and do stuff in the open, in secret.” Similarly, cinema’s capacity to condition spaces for gathering, and the double maneuver of opacity and transparency inherent in its making sets the precedent for this sort of investigation embedded in collaboration. These works present a way to renegotiate what forms around the binaries of outside and inside, of what we know and what we don’t need to know, of expanse and enclosure. The four artists invite us to think alongside them about the effects of subtle transformations, the eroticism of language and translation, dispersion and collectivity, and the architecture of permeability and impermanence. All through what might inspire new formations of the diasporic image.

This series offers an opportunity to showcase each artist’s work in an intimate setting, with conversations to follow the screening. As well, each artist facilitates a workshop the next day for students. This is a chance to think with them on process, practice and form and on how to build a foundational framework for collaboration to take place.

Curated by Nasrin Himada

Free, sign up: https://agnes.queensu.ca/participate/talks-tours-events/open-secret-sofia-gallisa-muriente/