written by Carina del Valle Schorske for Broadcast.

Intro excerpt below, link to full text here

I first met Natalia Lassalle-Morillo by a swimming hole on the river Inabón, in the mountains above the Puerto Rican city of Ponce. I was visiting my friend Mara Pastor, and Natalia was exploring the southern coast of the island with her friend Elisa Peebles. We’d already spoken by phone, after she read the translations I’d made of the poet Marigloria Palma, and used one poem—“Amigo, Esto Que Duele”—as the script for a collaborative film with her students at CalArts. It’s a bitter poem, but intimately so, addressed, as she says, to a “friend”: Because of Puerto Rico / I’m three hundred lightbulbs of illusion gone dead. She challenges the authenticity of certain rituals of grief—in the line behind the coffin, I wept if they wept—and proposes alternatives that can seem more destructive than creative—let’s set the sea on fire.

Sometimes, reading the poem out loud in mixed company, I’m afraid that channeling her political despair, her passionate disillusion, will make me seem reactionary, or unfit to collaborate in the project of freedom—for the archipelago, for the Puerto Rican people beyond the archipelago, or even just for myself. But it is precisely this discomfort that makes the poem liberating, and that has drawn me close to others who resonate with its transgressive intensity. Through the poem, Natalia and I came to call each other “friend,” and to value friendship as a practice of speaking in and through grief. Not grief as the mindless repetition of culturally sanctioned gestures of mourning, but grief beyond discourse: “ticking nerves”; “a howling in the paperwork”; “the blue-green convulsions of the ocean’s laughter.” Of course, sometimes those old gestures still have their place: together, we went to clean Marigloria Palma’s grave in Viejo San Juan. We left her flowers, a pineapple.

We recently spoke while sitting by the ocean at Piñones, one of the last stretches of undeveloped shoreline in the San Juan metro area, in Loiza, a town established by maroons in the 16th century and now populated by Black Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. We talked for a long time, in English and Spanish, in the water and on the sand, smoking and laughing, amid music and shouting, never thinking about how the noise of our exchange might make the conversation difficult to transcribe and translate.

This difficulty, after all, is the natural habitat of our friendship, and of many of the friendships that sustain something we might call the Puerto Rican people. Yet few have the patience to register and respond to the full texture of this dissonance, especially when there’s no guarantee of pleasure in the process or consensus on the other side. With En Parábola/Conversations on Tragedy (Part I), her multi-channel experimental film on view at Amant this past spring, Natalia has decided that this listening is worthwhile even without guarantees. She keeps calling us–“Agua!”–back to the water, where we can rinse our wounds, cool our furies, and let our language loose to mingle in the wordless churning.

Review of Foreign in a a domestic sense by Didier Morelli, exhibited at Dazibao in Montréal in 2024.

Review excerpt below. Full review here

While there is underlying melancholy in parts of the !lm, resilience and beauty are also central to its overall arc. One of its most powerful segments is rooted in the dance #oor as a space for communion, a site where Puerto Ricans !nd each other again in Florida. The onscreen images resonate with the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, in which half of the forty-nine people killed were Puerto Rican. Through their depictions of a nightclub, the artists commemorate this tragic event while maintaining a powerful and celebratory tone of queer solidarity. A sentence transcribed from Ramón’s interview rein forces this notion: “I love the club as a platform that allows us to enter the risk of being together, this effort to find our pleasure together.” In Foreign in a Domestic Sense, moments like these, of which there are many, offer hope and strength in the form of community. Split across an ocean, Puerto Ricans are still brought together by the rhythmic splendour of a culture united in dance.

Link to full journal article here

written by Bettina Pérez Martínez for cmag, 2024.

Excerpt below, link to full article here

The image of the dance floor also carries a deeper, painful significance in Foreign in a Domestic Sense. In 2016, Omar Mateen entered Pulse nightclub in Or- lando, FL, during a salsa night at the gay club, where he killed 49 people, and wounded 53 more; 90 percent of the victims were Latinx and half of that percentage were of Puerto Rican descent. In their text “Slow Dan- cing with Strangers” (2023), Gallisá Muriente and Lass- alle-Morillo express that Foreign in a Domestic Sense paid tribute to this tragedy that deeply affected local queer, trans, and Latinx communities, by centring the dance floor as a metaphor for a site of community and resistance. It’s an especially important metaphor given the ongoing state violence that continues to target Florida’s queer and trans individuals. In 2023, Florida governor Ron DeSantis passed various anti-LGBTQ2IA+ bills that ban trans medical care, remove sexual orienta-tion and gender identity from school curricula, and allow doctors to discriminate against LGBTQ2IA+ patients.

Throughout the filming process, the artists extended the metaphor of the dance floor by portraying the diasporic subjects of the film as dancers orienting them- selves on a new floor: that of Central Florida. Gallisá Muriente and Lassalle-Morillo document a karaoke bar where subjects sing famous Puerto Rican boleros while surrounded by visual elements reminiscent of home, such as images from the Puerto Rican countryside, and ad-vertisements for the local beer, Medalla. The film also presents other gathering spaces, such as a supermar-ket with various Puerto Rican staples, and a food court with decorations recreating the colonial architecture in Old San Juan. As these approximations are present-ed, one of the film’s interviewees, Teresa, calls Florida “a simulacrum.” Diasporic communities displaced from their former homes in Puerto Rico by ongoing colonial violence recreate familiar cultural, social, and historical markers in the colonized lands of Central Florida.

por fernanda ramos mena para artishock

“querida Antígona, tú también eres alguien que tiene fe”.

Anne Carson, Sófocles Antigonick.

Hace un mes, conocí a la artista Natalia Lassalle-Morillo a través de una llamada en línea, con el propósito de discutir su videoensayo En parábola/Conversations on Tragedy (Part 1) (1). Había recibido una invitación para streamear la obra antes de su inauguración o para asistir en persona en Amant, Brooklyn, Nueva York (2). Vivo en Ciudad de México y no tenía planes de viajar a Estados Unidos en el corto plazo. Sin embargo, Natalia accedió a conversar conmigo, y es desde la calidez de este intercambio que surge este texto*.

En parábola parte de una convocatoria en la que se invitó a puertorriqueñxs residentes en Nueva York a reunirse para leer Antígona. Es en esta convivencia previa donde el videoensayo comienza a tomar forma. El interés no era Antígona, era estar con otres puertorriqueñes. Por ello, estaban súper puestes para hablar, sentir, compartir y venían con mil ideas.

Las voces comienzan a alzarse para contar, de manera conjunta, una experiencia de vida que encierra múltiples historias sobre la compleja relación entre Puerto Rico y Estados Unidos, generando una identidad múltiple que vibra al unísono. Todas las experiencias diaspóricas son muy específicas, pero comparten una lucha en común. La experiencia puertorriqueña es particularmente pesada debido a nuestra relación con Estados Unidos; el pasaporte es un talón de Aquiles. Somos migrantes de labor. Se ha creado una mitología en la diáspora asentada en Nueva York, y lxs puertorriqueñxs han sido fundamentales en los últimos 100 años. De no ser así, no existirían la salsa, el hip hop, o el rap. Ya hay una historia nuyorican.

Sin ver el barco, escucho el golpeteo del motor sobre las aguas del océano; una voz plural se sobrepone a ese sonido, abriendo la narración del video. Por un momento, recorro el camino que va “del punto A al punto B” (3). Poco a poco, el sonido del oleaje golpeando contra las piedras de un puerto queda en primer plano. El Caribe lleva en sus corrientes la historia colonial de explotación de sus islas, el desplazamiento forzado, la crisis sociopolítica y las consecuencias del calentamiento global**. El agua es muy importante en el Caribe. En el archipiélago de Puerto Rico estamos condicionados por el agua del mar, los ríos, la lluvia y las inundaciones (4).

En el intercambio con Natalia y al ver/escuchar el video, no puedo dejar de sentir la intensa presencia del agua. Como si, en ese anhelo de buscar la tierra de origen, Puerto Rico, la voz creara un vaivén que mueve al cuerpo entre el aquí y el allá. A través de estas voces, surge un archivo del duelo cargado de anhelos de pertenencia y de una nostalgia que conecta con un pasado de migración y violencia colonial, que se extiende hacia el presente en la crisis del cambio climático y la situación sociopolítica del archipiélago. La práctica de archivo, tanto tangible como intangible, busca reafirmar la historia a través de la ficción. Hay tanto que no se puede conciliar con la verdad. Tenemos el mito y la ficción que, de alguna manera, nos permiten lidiar con esos espacios y huecos (5).

El ensayo comienza. Natalia da una indicación: “No necesitas actuar, solo tienes que prestarle tu voz al personaje, no necesitas interpretar” (6). Un grupo de cuatro mujeres camina, toma asiento y lee en voz alta partes de un guion. En el centro, un micrófono permite problematizar los vacíos del libreto; las participantes pueden levantarse de su silla y, al decir la palabra “AGUA”, ofrecer una respuesta sobre lo leído.

Durante esta puesta en común, las voces saltan entre el español y el inglés de manera indistinta. Surge a una lengua híbrida, puertorriqueña/nuyorican. Hay algo en cómo el Caribe, migrante, puertorriqueño es una experiencia intermedia que ha resultado del doble colonialismo. Tenemos este español que cambia entre español e inglés, adoptamos palabras de ambos idiomas y nos inventamos palabras nuevas.

Escribe Gabriela Milone en su libro Ficciones Fónicas (7): “Nuestra lengua es antes que latina, anfibia. Late húmeda en el aire tibio. Agua fónica”. Escucho las palabras que entrelazan las historias diaspóricas de Antígona/Emma, Raquel/Hemon, Tiresias/Nina y Erica/Ismene (8); hablan desde una lengua anfibia que transforma la tragedia de Antígona y la mantiene como memoria viva, una memoria caribeña que cuestiona no solo el canon, sino también el poder colonial e imperial que busca silenciar sus voces. Con esta lengua doble denuncian la sensación de desplazamiento y el deseo de regresar a una Tebas (Puerto Rico) —“o que ya no está en el mapa”—, a pesar de que Creonte siga en el poder.

“Soy (Son) una nueva extraña cosa entremedia, no pertenecen ni con los vivos ni con los muertos”. Al prestarle la voz al personaje, no solo analizan sus similitudes con estxs, sino que se reconocen a través de ellxs, fluyendo una vez más en esa identidad múltiple. ¿Cómo hablar de la tragedia del mundo contemporáneo sino es a través de la voz prestada de Emma, Raquel, Erica y Nina a Antígona, Hemon, Ismene y Tiresias?

Cuando pasa el huracán María, nos enfrentamos a una gran ola de desplazamiento a causa del cambio climático. Ahora mismo somos alrededor de medio millón de desplazades después del huracán, sumado a la acumulación de diferentes catástrofes que han impulsado a la población a migrar (9).

En 2017, el huracán María devastó Puerto Rico. La tragedia griega cobró presencia en las propuestas artísticas de Natalia para narrar lo indecible. “Pienso que la tragedia se siente un poco así, cuando todos los ruidos se callan”, dice Francesca al compartir su experiencia durante la fogata, mientras las cigarras cantan y el fuego hace crujir la madera.

Las múltiples voces de En parábola resuenan en la búsqueda de libertad, no en el dejar ir, sino en el reconocimiento de lo que una es. Es un resurgimiento de esperanza frente a lo que no se puede cambiar del pasado, pero desde el cual se puede actuar en el presente. Es una urdimbre llena de enmarañamientos que convoca a una identidad que, como dice Tiresias/Nina, tiene el esternón perforado por un alfiler que la conecta al pasado y al futuro (10).

Cuatro mujeres se presentan como un camino de esperanza entre historias de duelo. Reactivan su archivo vocalizando lo que son, así como su devenir. Transforman el subtexto patriarcal de la Antígona de Sófocles y convierten a sus personajes en versiones de ellas mismas. Una potencia femenina de contar la tragedia desde otro punto de vista en el que la muerte siempre está presente, aunque por un momento le hacen frente para esconderse “entre una multitud” (11) y vivir. En este sentido, contar historias personales a través de Antígona también evidencia historias sociales y culturales que suelen ser silenciadas por la historia en mayúscula (12).

En el ritmo vital que atraviesa el ensayo, En parábola cierra con un coro mixto dirigido por la multinstrumentalista Xenia Rubinos. Al menos 25 personas puertorriqueñas, de diversas generaciones, se reúnen para hacer catarsis. Frente a tanta tragedia, solo nos queda crear estos espacios colectivos de unión, donde podemos estar segures y soltar. Es terapéutico y activa la inteligencia fisiológica. Muchas personas no habían participado en este tipo de ensayo y fue un descubrimiento.

En ese coro quimérico, la voz se libera, se colectiviza. Contiene fragmentos de la experiencia de la diáspora y de la obra de Antígona. Entre una reverberación constante, el agua fónica regresa en forma de gritos y cantos de exaltación, combinándose con el agua de la memoria, así como con la del cuerpo: sudor, lágrimas, saliva. Se reúne un archivo afectivo de voces, mientras se activa una escucha profunda para estar juntes a lo largo de este ritual catártico.

Este final es un acto de regeneración; el cuerpo se mueve y suelta su voz en un anhelo del querer estar/pertenecer a uno y otro sitio al mismo tiempo. O de imaginar un futuro en el que pueden encontrar, en la oscuridad, la luz que les lleve de nuevo de camino a casa, a su tierra natal (13).

Referencias

*Los fragmentos en cursivas corresponden a lo que me compartió Natalia durante nuestra videollamada. Este ensayo contiene la lengua cruzada de esa conversación.

1. Natalia Lasalle-Morillo nombra a En parábola como una película multicanal. Sin embargo, al compartirle la idea de que su obra puede ser entendida también como un videoensayo, lo relacionó con cómo el proyecto está contenido de ensayos y el juego de palabras «rehearsal” y «essay» traducidas ambas como ensayo en español.
2. En parábola/Conversations on tragedy (Part 1), Amant, Brooklyn: https://www.amant.org/exhibitions/55-natalia-lassalle-morillo-en-parabola-conversations-on-tragedy-part-i En el video se profundiza en el desplazamiento forzado del pueblo Lenape en la zona de Brooklyn. Esta reflexión se amplía en el video para abordar la migración y el desplazamiento forzado de comunidades originarias en nombre del progreso y la modernización a principios del siglo XX, así como la actual gentrificación que expulsa a las comunidades migrantes de las zonas de moda en Nueva York.
3. En parábola: 33”
4. En referencia al concepto de multiplicidad al inicio del video, ver Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation: ​​https://monoskop.org/images/2/23/Glissant_Edouard_Poetics_of_Relation.pdf
5. Aunque esta frase no se refiere específicamente al libro Historia potencial de Ariella Azoulay, para Natalia es un referente que aparece en distintos momentos durante la producción de En parábola: http://t-e-e.org/files/t-e-eoria-2014/Azoulay-Historia-potencial.pdf
6. En parábola: 3’8”
7. Gabriela Milone, “Arquia fónica”, Ficciones fónicas. Materia, paisaje, insistencia de la voz. Santiago de Chile, Mimesis, 2022. p. 12
8. A lo largo del video participan otras personas como Janice y Francesca, así como Tashia, quien no habla pero es la que mantiene el fuego encendido en la escena de la fogata. Dentro del libreto de Antígona prestan su voz al personaje: Emma Suárez-Báez, Erica Ballester, Nina Lucía Rodríguez y Raquel Rodríguez
9. “Después del huracán María se estimó que unas 2 mil personas partían de Puerto Rico diariamente y cuatro meses después del evento se calculó que más de 300 mil personas habían salido de la isla y que el flujo pudo haber llegado a unos 470 mil durante el pasado año 2019”: ttps://www.uprrp.edu/2020/02/profesora-puertorriquena-presenta-hallazgos-de-investigacion-sobre-descenso-poblacional-tras-el-huracan-maria/
10. En parábola: 30’46”. Aquí parafraseo un diálogo de Nina/Tiresias.
11. En parábola: 16’36”. Emma describe a Antígona como un personaje que no es una heroína, que no se suicidó y que se escondió entre la multitud.
12. Ann Cvetokvich, “La vida cotidiana del trauma queer”, Un archivo de sentimientos. Trauma, sexualidad y culturas públicas lesbianas. Aunque Ann Cvetkovich se refiere específicamente a la cultura queer, creo que en este videoensayo se construye un archivo que le hace frente al silenciamiento de una cultura dominante y que en un foro comparten historias personales que reflejan desde la colectividad su vínculo social y culturas.
13. Esta frase dialoga con el monólogo de Raquel/Hemon sobre dónde queda Tebas en el mapa. En parábola: 17’10” al 18’52”

**Al momento de escribir este ensayo han pasado nueve meses del genocidio de Israel al pueblo palestino. Al abordar temas de tragedia, desplazamiento y violencia colonial, en medio de nuestra conversación surge la importancia de nombrar lo que está sucediendo actualmente, de no ser ajenxs a la masacre, de no olvidar ni voltear la mirada para no dejarnos afectar.

En Parábola/Conversations on Tragedy, Part I opens with a trio of discrete shots of a boat’s wake unfolding across the film’s channels, the camera positioned backwards as the boat drives forward. Throughout En Parábola,images of water recur as the film periodically returns to slow shots of the Hudson, the Gowanus Canal, and the shores of New York and Puerto Rico. In an interview accompanying the installation, filmmaker Natalia Lassalle-Morillo quotes Martinican writer Édouard Glissant who describes departure as “the moment when one consents not to be a single being and attempts to be many beings at the same time. In other words, for me every diaspora is the passage from unity to multiplicity.” 

What happens when one consents to be more than one being at the same time? The question repeats throughout En Parábola, which Lassalle-Morillo co-authored with teacher and poet Erica Ballester, artist Nina Lucía Rodríguez, consultant and researcher Raquel Rodríguez, and writer Emma Suárez-Báez. In the film, Lassalle-Morillo uses Sophocles’s tragedy Antigoneas a framework to consider the political, social, and economic state of Puerto Rico. Through a call to non-actors, Lassalle-Morillo invited participants in Puerto Rico and New York’s Puerto Rican diasporic community to attend a series of open rehearsals, where they read and remade the text of Antigone. In doing so, she initiated an emotional space for collective catharsis. In the first rehearsal scene, she tells the group that they don’t need to act or perform, but only to lend their voices to the characters. She punctures their readings with the spoken word agua, which signals a moment of pause for participants to recount their experiences of migration and displacement, and to reflect on how catastrophe operates within both Antigone and their current communities in Puerto Rico and the diaspora.

At the opening, musician Xenia Rubinos led a participatory performance informed by Pauline Oliveros’s practice of Deep Listening, where participants become attuned to their present sonic environment through the act of conscious listening. During the performance, the audience improvised vocalizations in response to Rubinos, moving in a procession from Amant’s courtyard to the room of En Parábola’s installation. There, narrow pieces of white paper with printed text were circulated, and as the hum of the collective chorus continued, the audience was invited to read into the microphones at the center of the room. The participants became a vessel for the printed words, which were excerpts from interviews and testimonies Lassalle-Morrillo collected throughout the course of the project. In the polyphony of the film and the performance, authorship became dispersed, liquid and multiple.

Antigone has been an iteratively central text for Lassalle-Morillo, enacted in previous staged theater performances and short films. The tragedy has a well-documented history of being remade and restaged with political applications, particularly in Latin and South America. Throughout Lassalle-Morillo’s projects, Antigone serves as a viewfinder for considering chaos, catastrophe, and the impacts of collective trauma. Lassalle-Morillo has said her use of this text is not primarily an intellectual project but an affective one. En Parábola is constructed with tenderness: the subjects are frequently filmed at an intimate distance, the camera dwelling on participants as they embrace, or lean on one another, sharing weight. In the scenes discussing Antigone’s characters the participants bring an uncommon compassion to their considerations, suffusing the characters with emotional and symbolic complexity. In one scene they imagine King Creon, Antigone’s uncle, as representative of natural catastrophe or capitalism or patriarchy, but they also personify and modernize him, saying that he’s like a patriotic uncle who advocates for Puerto Rican statehood rather than liberation.

The impulse to modernize Antigone’s characters is a shared project in the work of poet Anne Carson, whose writing has informed Lassalle-Morillo. Early in En Parábola, one participant reads from Carson’s Antigonick during rehearsal: “I’m a strange in-between thing, aren’t I? Not at home with the living nor the dead.” Partway through the film, Haimon, son of Creon, and Ismene, Antigone’s sister, are pictured beside one another, their faces split across the left and central screens. “After the revolution, what becomes of you, Ismene?” Haimon asks. Ismene responds that they’d like to be buried in their backyard and for their body to become a tree, as the left screen goes black and Haimon leans their head against Ismene’s.

The film’s final ten minutes are devoted to an extended closing scene of a chorus rehearsal led by Rubinos, a primarily sonic exercise with the occasional integration of spoken text and calls of entres de aguas (between these waters) or libertad. The sound coalesces and eventually breaks down. One of Lassalle-Morillo’s collaborators, Raquel Rodríguez, stands at the microphone, repeating the word agua, speaking with such force that she eventually breaks from language and into a scream. In two close-up shots—one on the right screen and then on the left—the camera catches the studio lights reflected in the tears that have welled in the eyes of the participants.

“The political is in the work. I know it’s in there, because I put it in there.”- Jack Whitten

“A Region in the Mind” derives its title from James Baldwin’s Essay “Letter from a Region in my Mind”, where Baldwin draws from personal and systemic experience to examine himself and the power structure in the United States. Yet Rosa-Rey’s “A Region in the Mind” is slightly different– her paintings and drawings evoke internal terrains of consciousness, etching a metaphor for an intimate pulsation of knowing. Informed by historical sources and memories, these story-terrains evoke an imaginary elsewhere not bound by territory or geography– an in-between place amidst the Caribbean and diaspora, a geography where Rosa-Rey can delink herself from an identitarian value system, and instead embody an opaque margin.

Rosa-Rey spends extended periods of time executing simple yet complex gestures. Using brushes, excavation tools, dental picks, magnifying glasses, and wooden branches, she probes and incises the canvas, creating topographies and geographies that evoke fragmentation and non-linearity– meeting places for memory and history to overlap. She adopted these methodologies from her childhood memories growing up in Hartford, Connecticut, with her mother and eight siblings. Playing with the earth, excavating the ground with branches, scraping what she thought was silver off rocks– these backyard materials and memories resurface today in this body of work as floating images and unanchored terrains, referencing diasporic movement. Her work behaves like an enacted poem, where grief, dreams, and meaning are embedded and emerging from within.

Rosa-Rey’s conflicting relationship with the grid can be traced throughout the body of work presented in this exhibition. The grid is a structure she uses to envision space, yet she’s aware that the gridded envisioning of space was both a tool and a product of colonization. Instead of avoiding conflicts and contradictions, she incises the grid with an X-ACTO blade, carving the lines through the surface of the canvas. For Rosa-Rey, these incisions are an awareness of this grid as a colonial device that partitioned land, set up borders, and forcefully removed generations of families. Clouds, climates, atmospheres, oceans, sand, and earth, overflow the constraints of these incised lines and exist beyond these margins. These simple gestures in her work are elemental and primordial, expressing ideas in their bare bones without seductive embellishments. Yet if you look deeper, the work draws you into a potential abyss, or “into areas which are not the most comfortable in the world”.1

With this exhibition, her first on the Puerto Rican archipelago, Rosa-Rey traverses a passage within a cycle, where she returns, through her work, to the watery wombs of her birthplace. “A Region in the Mind: Terrenos y Cuentos” can become an offering to her origins— to Puerto Rico—a journey that continues this transoceanic movement across territories and consciousnesses.

Natalia Lassalle-Morillo

*Special Thanks to G.Rosa Rey for her work, her words, and the many conversations that informed this text.

1. From the Interview “A Region in the Mind: A Conversation with G. Rosa-Rey and Natalia Lassalle-Morillo”, published by the Latinx Project in February 2022.

Written by Natalia Lassalle-Morillo for Interventions / Latinx Project

G. Rosa-Rey is a Brooklyn, N.Y. based visual artist. Her work invokes texture, gestural markings and grids to reference place. She incises and probes the canvas, creating “terrenos”—topographies and geographies that evoke fragmentation and non-linearity—meeting places for memory and history to overlap. Conceptually, Rosa’s use of materials are informed by the Puerto Rican diasporic consciousness in the wake of Operation Bootstrap, and guided by her experiences growing up and living in the United States.

Born in Isabela, Puerto Rico, Rosa-Rey and her family moved to Hartford, Connecticut in the late 1950s during the Puerto Rican migration to the States. In the early 1970s she relocated to New York City to study fine art as an undergraduate at Pratt Institute, and continued her graduate studies in the same field at Columbia University. Rosa-Rey's creative pursuits expanded to include flamenco dance. She returned to her painting practice, feeling that she had developed a sense of clarity regarding personal history and political events that informed her trajectory.

In the light of her first solo show at Hidrante this February, Natalia Lassalle-Morillo and G. Rosa Rey spoke over Zoom on a Monday evening, nestled by the cacophony of sirens in Hato Rey, Puerto Rico, and Flatbush, Brooklyn.

—

Natalia: I want to start out by asking you a question that is quite personal, but that I feel defines your work. What is home for you?

G. Rosa-Rey: Where do I belong? That's a big question for me. And perhaps home was Puerto Rico. This was my first home up until the age of four. My family left Puerto Rico during the Puerto Rican Great Migration, in 1959. And as evident in that family photo you have seen, which was taken at the airport in Puerto Rico, our expressions upon leaving foreshadows this foreboding future. So my sense of home was not one place. When we came to the States, we were constantly moving. And that's what I remember.

Natalia: I want to talk about the title of this body of work. First, let’s start with a Region in the Mind. I’m curious about what this phrase means to you, and how it connects to the works that will be exhibited at Hidrante this upcoming February.

G. Rosa-Rey: Region in the mind has its origins in history, lived experiences and memory for me. It derives from James Baldwin's essay, “Letter From a Region in my Mind”, where Baldwin draws from personal and systemic experience to examine himself and to also examine the power structure in this country. And so I use the title Region in the Mind, which is slightly different, as a metaphor for an internal pulsation of knowing and reckoning with these forces that I had to live with all my life.

Natalia: When I last visited your studio, you said: “Memory is a region in the mind”. You refer to it as a region in the mind, and I refer to this as a consciousness in the atmosphere—one that results from the sense of displacement that you, me, and many other Puerto Ricans have experienced at some point of our lives. The experience that you gather outside of the motherland can disconnect you from the visceral experience of being in Puerto Rico. There’s so much nuance I’ve had to reconnect with since I returned. Nuance that is intangible. Nuance that I can’t really put words to, but that is very much embedded in the fiber of being here. You feel such a powerful connection to this place and simultaneously feel such lack of control over our destiny. We haven’t processed the colonial history we have inherited, nor the accumulation of tragedies that have taken place in the last 10 years… I've come to understand that what we want, we must imagine and create, because it doesn't exist yet.

G. Rosa Rey: But I have also wondered: have we had the time to mourn? I think that many of us have been so preoccupied with survival, that we have not mourned. We have not had that space to mourn, because mourning entails vulnerability and it's important to stay strong, and to be able to do, really just to survive. I feel like I am just now mourning, and I have to get through this mourning before I can get to that next stage, which is imagining another place. And often when I do think about imagining another place, I sometimes think of inhabiting the margins because it's also a form of delinking, of saying to myself:” I'm getting out of this, and I am not a part of this kind of value system. I want something completely different. Let me explore what these margins really are”.

Natalia: It’s beautiful that you say this… through my work I’ve been facilitating spaces of dialogue, which have really become spaces of grief and mourning. I think we're moving at a pace where language doesn't do service to the nuance of our feelings. So it becomes necessary to summon spaces where we can spend time and commune with each other, in order to channel this grief into something transformative.

G. Rosa Rey: Sometimes we are thought of as people who don’t have feelings. For me, there has been a tremendous breakthrough. I see myself truly mourning and crying and I feel how incredible it is to get to the point where I can allow myself to feel those emotions, to see all that history through. Because I think you have to go through that in order to arrive at the next step. To acknowledge these emotions, pay attention to them, and begin the next journey.

Natalia: I’ve gathered from our many conversations how childhood memories resurface in your work. One of these memories is forever embedded in my mind… a dream where your house in Connecticut would flood entirely with water. What is your relationship to memory and history?

G. Rosa Rey: The house filling up with water and being able to swim in it—I’m honestly not sure if this was a dream or just recurring thoughts that came out during play. It's sort of a blur, but this took place in Hartford. And Hartford is very important to me because my mother's death took place there, so it’s a very sacred place for me. This was also where my early memories were formed. But the image of the house filling with water was related to the womb, and this wanting to return to origins. I'm not sure if I was longing to go back to Puerto Rico or a place of safety.

But in terms of the materials and the process, these references do go back to childhood. I come from a fairly large family of many siblings. There were so many of us that we couldn't be in the house, so we were always outside. And so the outdoors became my playground. I played with the earth. I drew on it, and excavated the ground with the branches. A memory that stands out is scraping what I thought was silver off the rocks and transferring that dust by allowing the residue to fall into these penny paper bags that I had collected. They almost became these samples, like containers for whatever that excavation was that I was doing. And so today I find those memories resurfacing in the work. They are innocent moments of, I would say, investigation and discovery for me. I have also incorporated some of those processes in my current work.

Natalia: Your paintings are full of textures. They are terrains, and they look like topographies and geographies. I’m curious to ask you about the colors, materials and tools you use, for example sand and archeological tools, since they allude to “territory” in a particular way.

G. Rosa Rey: Many of the materials and processes also go back to childhood. These pieces have a lot to do with earth. I use brushes, excavation tools such as spatulas, dental picks, magnifying glasses, measuring tapes, and branches, which I have sharpened and shaped to further scratch marks and probe the surfaces that I work on. I also use sand, which I transfer from sandpaper onto the surfaces that I'm working on. The work is never complete. But eventually these images float on the wall, evoking movement and shifting for me…unanchored terrains, which I feel are a reference to the diaspora. They're just floating, not anchored in any form.

The images represent internal terrains I would say of consciousness, like a place where history and memory intersect and inform who we are, the pulse of who we are. And those things can come together in very pleasant ways or in very unpleasant ways.

Natalia: Can you talk about the second part of the title, Terrenos y Cuentos?

G. Rosa Rey: I think that the work is informed by a multitude of sources, the most prominent being historical sources, memory and story. And they're the stories that we create to give meaning, and also to build community. Memory is always very slippery because it’s very difficult to grasp time. So when I'm thinking of these stories, I'm taken back to my mom, my beloved mom, who used to tell oral stories. The stories that she told were about el cuco, or la mano arrugada. She would tell stories to give us advice. For instance, one that I remember was: be careful not to swallow an avocado seed because you will grow an avocado tree on your head. These stories were moments of family union. And honestly, it was also a way to connect back to Puerto Rico.

Natalia: El cuco made it to my generation. My grandma was all about el cuco.

G. Rosa Rey: I was terrified of el cuco.

Natalia: But I think this relates to mythmaking, and our necessity to create myths to find a language or meaning for this strange experience of belonging.

Throughout my time knowing you, you’ve referenced different sensorial images and aural phenomena in relation to the diasporic experience. A couple of months ago, you mentioned how throughout your life, you heard this ever-present hum that continuously reminded you that you were from many places, and had many parts. How does being a Puerto Rican from the diaspora, and your current relationship to your birthplace, manifest in your work?

G. Rosa Rey: I'm really excited to share my work in my place of origin. And it continues to have a deep meaning for me, even though I've been gone for so long. I have family there. The house that I was born in is still there. La finca that my mother owned is still there and we still own that land.

There's always this sadness when I go. It’s hard to pinpoint why. It’s like something is gone, something that I wish I had. I’m not quite sure what it is, and I can make up a lot of justifications for this melancholiness. It’s very deep and related to something lost, and one can’t capture that. Knowing how changed we’ve become. We’re not who we were back then, and neither is the place. The place has changed. I think I need to spend some time in Puerto Rico to investigate and discover what these emotions are.

Natalia: I agree. Every time I return, the first week is one of chaos and adjustment. When people used to ask me what was special about this place, I would speak about how strong the gravitational pull was here. Then I started reading about the Puerto Rico trench, which is the deepest point in the Atlantic Ocean, and the point with the most negative gravity anomaly on earth. This is my way of justifying the unjustifiable.

This is an experience we both share. Perhaps a way of beginning this journey of return is your work spending time here. I'm excited for it to live here and have an encounter with the birth land.

G. Rosa Rey: Yes, it's almost like they (the pieces) are leaving. They're cocooned, and they're going out and they're being shared. That’s what it’s all about really, the work being out there and the viewer interacting with it. And what a better place than Puerto Rico. I would have never thought that the work would ever even go there. So that too is something that I'm trying to process, it’s a big deal. It's almost like going full circle, but not quite.

I think if the work comes back that it will, for lack of a better word, return maybe blessed by something.

Natalia: I wanted to ask you about a quote you mentioned when I last visited your studio. “The political is in there because I put it in there. It’s in there because I cut it in with a blade.” This stayed with me for weeks. It also reminded me of what’s so powerful about abstraction—it can behave like a poem, and the meaning is embedded within it.

You made this comment in relation to your use of the grid, and your conflicting relationship to it: the grid helps you envision space, but you are also aware of how this same envisioning of space was both a tool and a product of colonization. We exist at a time where we are facing a collapse of modernity and its grids. This is very visible in a place like Puerto Rico—a country of failed electrical grids. It’s a long preface to this question, but I wanted to unpack your relationship to the grid and its significance in this body of work.

G. Rosa Rey: “The political is in the work. I know it's in there, because I put it in there.” That was Jack Whitten who said that, and it really stuck with me.

My process often involves drawing the grid with an X-ACTO blade, actually. And so the lines appear as surface markings, but they are incisions. That's what I call them, because they cut through the surface, but not through the paper. It's also an extension of that hum, something which continues to need reckoning with. These incisions are an awareness for me of the grid as a colonial device that partitioned land and set up borders. Of forced removal, which took place not only here, but in other countries as well, and which continues to take place.

Natalia: I am always collecting sensorial “imagery”, whether it’s images, sounds or dreams. Dreams are very important for me, because I’m always trusting the space the subconscious mind occupies. I feel dreams speak to what I am not manifesting in my waking life. What is your relationship to dreams?

G. Rosa Rey: Dreams are always very complex. And I think what makes them complex is time. Because in dreams, everything seems to be displaced, and in many ways time doesn’t exist because the past is not there, the future is not here, and the now doesn’t exist because it is gone, right? When we say we live in the present, right after making that statement, the present is gone. Where is time? It’s very slippery. I find non-linear time fascinating, and I try to convey some of those ideas, stories, and that sense of displacement. You can take some of my pieces and arrange them any way you want because there is no order to them.

There’s something about that which is also connected to diaspora. Displacement, the concept of time, of memory, it just seems to fold into itself in dreams. It’s fascinating. Even the concept of time I’m still trying to understand, because everything is an illusion. I'm sure philosophers have tried to answer that question, but it's never fixed, because everything is constantly changing. Everything is so fluid.

Natalia: I’m interested in this which you bring up: non-linear time, diasporic time, and the fragmentation of memory that emerges from that. I sometimes refer to this as “the piling up of time”. Past, present, future happening at the same time.

G. Rosa Rey: Having all these lines moving in different directions, but happening at the same time.

Natalia: Exactly. Rosa, I also wanted to ask about where you gather your influences. I’m aware you were trained as an artist in institutions such as Pratt and Columbia, but I know that most of the work you are currently developing was created outside the margins of an institution. I also know you were a Flamenco dancer, which I have always been curious to ask about and intrigued to know if it has at all influenced your abstract work.

G. Rosa Rey: I must say that I am grateful that I did go through those institutions, though when I was there, I was the only Puerto Rican in my department at Columbia. It was a very Euro/Western-centric kind of place. Art considered to be outside that genre was referred to as “primitive.” So it was difficult because I had to do a lot of investigation on my own, and I think that some of that education is hard to get away from. It seeps into you and it’s hard to renounce it.

But I would say my early influence as far as painting goes was my professor and mentor at the Pratt Institute, Ernie Briggs. He was a second generation abstract expressionist. Art was personal and self-reflective for Briggs. He said that you have to communicate with yourself first and then you can communicate with your viewers. This stuck with me, that self-analysis and self-questioning.

Flamenco was also an influence in the work. I think that I had to leave painting and venture into something that was more supportive and that was not Eurocentric, like the education that I was getting. And so flamenco offered that. It was already a ready-made art form that I was able to enter and feel honestly like I was at home. Because flamenco is protest, it's passion and it's earth and all these qualities have seeped into the work. Those were experiences of love, not only teaching it, but also professionally dancing it.

I returned to the visual arts after Flamenco because I was able to re-enter the work with more consciousness of the self. I realized I’m still looking for something and I haven’t found it. I suppose this keeps me moving.

Natalia: I’m very happy you answered this question about flamenco, because it's something that I've always wondered about. I can see it in the work. Flamenco is earth, it’s beating into the earth.

G. Rosa Rey: It's all down. The plié is down into that ground, you know. And the politics are there already, so that attracted me to it. It’s like a protest. This is pariah, this is the cry. And I felt “this is where I belong, right here”.

Natalia: You spend a lot of time doing simple gestures that are very difficult, and that hold great depth and meaning. Can you share a bit about how your process of making these works unfolds, in and out of the studio?

G. Rosa Rey: All I can say is that those simple gestures and marks in my work are thought up as elemental or primordial. And it's a way to express ideas from the bare bones without having the seductive embellishments.

Natalia: It's raw. There's something else that is seeping through the surface that is not beautiful.

G. Rosa Rey: I think it goes a little deeper. Maybe into the abyss or something, or into those areas that are not the most comfortable in the world.

Written by Elisa Peebles; Published in the newsprint accompanying the exhibition En Parábola/Conversations on Tragedy (Part I) at Amant in Brooklyn, in 2024.

Take a look at the newsprint, here.

In more ways than one, life in the Caribbean is shaped by the water and what it decides to do on any given day: how tightly it hugs the air, how heavy it falls, how full it gets, its overwhelming presence or unbearable absence. Those thirsty for domination have interpreted these hydroaesthetics as rationale for Caribbean unfreedom. The scientific racism of the 19th century claimed that environmental conditions like the weather produce racial difference, accidentally confirming, in the name of Western “science”, the body’s permeability. “Equatorial” races of the Southern hemisphere, like Africans and “Latin people”, were considered inferior due, in part, to their entanglement with water and heat. This biometeorologic inferiority rendered Caribbean people unfit to govern themselves and their environment in the eyes of an imperial United States that turned science into legal scripture. The insular cases of the U.S. Supreme Court provide the legal bedrock for the country’s colonial control over the territories it gained through the Spanish American War in 1898: Guam, the Philippines and Puerto Rico. Citing the decision of the Dred Scott case, Downes v Bidwell established that, due to the “alien race” of its inhabitants, Puerto Rico is “foreign to the United States in a domestic sense,” a place where conquered people are granted US citizenship but not guaranteed the rights detailed in the US constitution. This decision is one of the first of many acts of legal half-lifeing that have led to multiple waves of forced displacement and outmigration from Puerto Rico.

The humidity has witnessed it all. Water vapor, like all water, absorbs everything: tragedy, exhaust fumes, ozone, Saharan dust, absence. Encaptured in constant aquatic cycles of precipitation, evaporation and transpiration, the phenomena of a place levitates in its air. Theorists like Teresa Brennan present affect–the psychoemotional “atmosphere” of a room–as contagious, spreading through some act of transmission, like scent, or as a biological response to social stimuli. This view frames affect as avoidable, particularly because atmosphere is conceived as something contained within a space enclosed by four walls that are presumed inanimate, thus making the people present the sole source of feelings. But when thinking with water, specifically cloud formations, affect exists less like something we catch (or can avoid, perhaps by walking out of a room) and more like something we are always in relation with and cannot escape.

I am guided towards this line of thinking by the hydroaesthetics of Puerto Rico, where there are porous boundaries between outside and inside and you are in constant connection with all that surrounds you and leaves traces of itself in the humidity: the bones and memories contained in the soil, the breath of trees, the energy that reverberates through buildings, the sweat released from people, sound waves that enchant the air, things that blow in from across the water, like tourists and storms. Through respiration, it all enters the body and bloodstream and comes back out again to rejoin itself as something not quite old nor new, singular, or plural—an infinity that is of and beyond you. Perhaps this dance with totality is what disgusted 19th century colonizers, who were intimidated by the ways it undermines their projects of containment and made anxious by the possibilities of precipitation and number of witnesses it implicates. Mediated through the cloud, the air is filled with information, chemicals and organic ephemera, energy and affect—particles of feelings and phenomena clumped together in humidity. If we believe, as Christina Sharpe tells us, that water is an archive, then the rules of hydrotechnology dictate that this capacity is not restricted to oceans, and oceans do not end at shores. Through proximity and breath, those engaged with Puerto Rican humidity commune with a waterbound “archive of feelings”, one constructed by a land, people and atmosphere that have experienced consistent and repeated catastrophe in the wake of colonialism, slavery, and imperialism. Here, in the cloud, floats traces of information that evade official archives. For example, the feeling of an apagón is not contained in congressional legislative hearings about LUMA, but it impacts whether people want the company to have unrivaled control over their electric grid. Then again, that archive has never been concerned with Puerto Rican desire, but in the cloud that blankets the archipelago, desire is palpable and held close to the ground, along with other feelings that follow tragedy, such as anger, rage, and grief. Grief is a form of desire, a belonging that refuses to be severed, carried by fragments who remember and desire the whole. It can be a radical insistence that speaks back to colonial violence and says “you are killing us, but we will live anyway.” Grief has and can rewrite history. There are freedom strategies tucked away in this cloud, entre esta agua.

Let us turn to En Parábola.

We begin with El Coro, the film’s reimagining of a Greek chorus. Filmed in a dark room drenched in cool blue light, the members of this chorus are diverse in age, gender presentation, race and skin tone. It is a collected but ununified group of people. Every face appears to be in a daze, but each daze is different. The scene’s sound embodies and complicates this heterogeneity. There are traces of melodic humming and singing, at times joined by harmonies, punctuated by whispered words and phrases too soft to be discerned but loud enough to be noticed. Rustling behind and cutting through the soundscape is a myriad of non-verbal utterances, swishes and shhh’s that mimic waves. A microphone stands in front of the chorus. Individuals approach and make noise into it that is sometimes, but not always, amplified or responded to by the rest of the chorus. The cameras sway ambivalently, focusing on the mic when someone is present, but otherwise slowly panning back and forth across the chorus. With this tidal motion, shot entirely in close-up, the scene looks like a stream of floating heads. Watching it is reminiscent of attempting to hold a river in your gaze. Only after convincing your ocular reception to disavow stillness and singularity can one behold a river. The sound editing supports this hydroaesthetic. It’s clear the audio we hear is a part of the diegetic whole, even if it may come from a time or a place that is separate from the visual moment on screen. In this way, the chorus simultaneously exists in and beyond the frame. The viewer encounters it, even if we cannot fully behold it. In its totality, the chorus is uncontainable, and potentially infinite, like a body of water, or a diaspora. Its heterogeneous members make sounds that converge, diverge, mimic, compliment, and compete. It is a boundless whole that, in chaos, makes sense of itself.

Developed over the course of five years, En Parábola is a reimagining of Antigone that interrogates what director Natalia Lassalle-Morillo calls Puerto Rico’s “grief contract”. She has shared that the inspiration for En Parábola came from her interest in tragedy as “a system, a form of collective catharsis to maintain the whole,” a reference to the history of Ancient Greek theater as a form of communion meant to restore collectivity following catastrophe. The project proposes an affective and cosmological layer to Puerto Rico’s decolonial and post-apocalyptic discourses and recognizes Puerto Rico as a nation that, to an extent, exists outside of itself. More Puerto Ricans live in the United States than those who reside in the archipelago. This compounds Puerto Rico’s already queer status as a U.S. territory that is neither in or of the United States, and as a nation that has never known political sovereignty in its modern history. Such fragmentation and denied autonomy politically make Puerto Rico “a strange new kind of inbetween thing,” like Antigone. This requires alternative approaches to imagining Puerto Rico’s totality when summoning its future. Part of that work might be creating sites of communion where there can be an interrogation of what remains within reach of Puerto Ricans in the Caribbean and elsewhere, and one of those things is their grief.

Through En Parábola, Lassalle-Morillo uses theater to facilitate this convening. The project features an ensemble of non-professional and untrained performers who live in New York and Puerto Rico. Through a series of scriptwriting sessions, speculative worldbuilding labs, documentary film shoots and theatrical rehearsals, they read, discuss, and rewrite Antigone through a Puerto Rican lens. In the rehearsal space, Lassalle-Morillo invites performers to “become what doesn’t exist”: a people that while fragmented by catastrophe maintain a potentiality for wholeness that can, “through ritual” be uncovered and reveal what she calls “continuance that is collectively conjured.” The invitation to become what doesn’t exist can also be considered an invitation to perform closeness, which Olivia Gagnon argues is a minoritarian strategy for recovering intimacy disrupted by historical and colonial acts of violence. The project is incredibly intimate. The cast was formed through a series of open rehearsals, advertised through digital flyers Lassalle-Morillo shared on social media that sought out Puerto Ricans who have direct or ancestral connection to parts of New York that became enclaves of New York’s Puerto Rican diaspora. The flyers were shared by her network and her network’s network and so on, leading to rehearsal rooms filled with people connected through invisible threads of relation. These unknowing relatives, what some may call strangers, spent hours in workshops in which they were invited to share their thoughts and feelings about Puerto Rico, and engage with the thoughts and feelings of other Puerto Ricans. Mimicking the archipelago’s affective cloud, they produced a body of knowledge through a pouring out and taking in that dissolves the boundaries between individuals, time, dreams, and memories. The project generates what Gagnon, building on Ann Cvetkovich, calls a tender archive: an affectually resonant and intimately tended to “ collection of cultural texts,” that “preserves and produces feeling difficult to capture in traditional repositories [and functions] as a site of mourning.” This work is physically materialized and exemplified in El Coro.

In July 2023, Lassalle-Morillo held an open call that invited Puerto Ricans based in New York City to co-create a version of a Greek chorus in Bushwick. Conducted by multi-instrumentalist Xenia Rubinos, the chorus was prompted to vocally channel “memories yet to be vocalized,” along with words of reflection from diasporic Puerto Ricans interviewed earlier by Lassalle-Morillo. The result is a haunting and chaotic cacophony. Through breath and vibration, an innumerable group of individuals—strange(r) relatives—become enmeshed in a single, sonic moment that has no beginning or end, leader or dissenter. All sound enters and returns from the whole. Even those who approach the microphone to make utterances never utter alone. The room is filled with affective traces of each participant, unvocalized memories that emerge from each body but are not only of those bodies. The dazed looks of bewilderment and awe, as well as those of angst, nervousness, or distress, seem to signal the encountering of affect throughout the space and the experience of hydrodynamic exchange. There also appears to be moments of negotiation in the ways some chorus members react to those at the microphone and standing next to them, as if to suggest that not all feelings are absorbed equally or unquestioningly. This is representative of the complexity of grief. The diversity of those gathered across age and racial lines makes present different experiences of diaspora, and thus different types of mourning. Some may mourn what they have left and may never return to, others grieve what they haven’t experienced, and others may regret the experience of knowing neither position but relating to and being implicated by them nonetheless.

At one point, Raquel Rodríguez, a member of the chorus, walks to the microphone and repeats in syncopated bursts “Entre esta agua, entre estas aguas,” meaning, between this water, between all this water, building in intensity and possibly something like pain or fury, until she is screaming “Agua! Agua! Agua!” over and over again before sighing into silence. Water is a throughline in the film and rehearsal space. This is no doubt a nod to the role of water in shaping Puerto Rico as a Caribbean archipelago and diaspora, but perhaps it also conjures an imagining of Puerto Rico as water: as a shapeless and shapeshifting wholeness that disperses and recollects itself over time and space, like a cloud. Grief, in its stubborn insistence and many forms, demands wholeness and belonging, refusing to relegate them to the past and instead suspends them in time to sit besides the phenomena of the present. Grief disrupts time and space, and for diasporic people facing political and existential threats of nonbelonging and discontinuation, tending to grief becomes a mode of saying “we are here, the future is here, entre esta agua.”

En Parábola’s tender archive provides a kind of tender citizenship, an unshakeable belonging that offers an otherwise unavailable sense of wholeness and emphasizes the inability of politics to tend to the harm of tragedy. In some ways, it is in conversation with the sentiments of other Caribbean diasporic people who shirk national belonging and proudly proclaim “We are our own country!” But En Parábola reaches for more than the nowhere space of El Nie. In rewriting as opposed to reperforming Antigone, the cast undoes colonial acts of legal half-lifing by inviting Puerto Ricans to rehearse removing themselves from their living entombment. As a collaboration between archipelago-bound and US-bound Puerto Ricans, land remains present materially and immaterially in the way it is provoked within the complexity of the cast’s grief. Through this emphasis on grief as a relational thread, En Parábola presents a form of affective citizenship rooted in longing: we belong where we are longed for. Water always reaches towards itself, whether it returns to land or the atmosphere, or is carried by interlocutors in between. The hydroaesthetics of this tender citizenship operates via a besidesness that topples dualistic notions of belonging. They suggest that fragmentation creates a whole that is forever changed by its fragments but remains present and continuous; a boundless whole that cannot be contained by projects of statehood, foreign or domestic, but is materialized in affect that moves through relating bodies, though belongs to no one. Lassalle-Morillo shared in a reflection on the project: “this affective intimacy is the currency of Puerto Rican sovereignty.” To grieve, collectively, is to defy the regime, the archive, the political forces of violence and dispossession, and even the limitations of the imagination; it is to keep the Otherwise constantly present and besides the now and refuse severance from freedom. One of the other words that circulate through the chorus is maravillosa, meaning marvelous and wonderful, as if to say: “how wonderful, how miraculous we are in our grief.”

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Written by Monica Uszerowicz and translated by Roque Salas-Rivera for Burnaway Magazine's "Treasures" print issue.

Full text and translation here

It begins with the chorus of coquis, Puerto Rico’s beloved frog, trickling in the way it does at night, heralding the turn of the day with increasing volume and the tonal cadence of a waterfall. In a room bustling with a production crew—curtains shoved, lampshades atilt—a young woman is enervated on a couch, her knees splayed with a pile of books between them, her listlessness a weary acquiescence. The hand to her heart might denote anxiety; her unwillingness to move means it’s the sort that topples you. Her husband, unseen, declares he’s leaving for good. She’d begged him to reconsider. Now she’s resigned, stretched thin. As the scene unfolds, the director—the actress’s mother—appears in a second frame, nodding, watching. During this scene of Retiro, Natalia Lassalle-Morillo’s multichannel film, the artist briefly portrays her mother, Gloria Morillo Cabán, the subject and cowriter. Retiro is intentionally ambiguous in title, translating in English to “retreat” or “retirement”; the ongoing project, born in 2015, comprises the completed film and its ever-changing presentations. This part is palimpsestic, a thread from the film’s earliest incarnation: Natalia’s reconstruction of a pivotal instance from Gloria’s life, directed by Gloria herself.

How do we become our mothers? I’m fascinated with the way life begins: a baby in the womb holds, in her ovaries, all the oocytes that her body will ever grow into ovums. (The Boricua poet Julia de Burgos described the Río Grande de Loíza—in her poem of the same name—as “my wellspring, my river / since the maternal petal lifted me to the world”; perhaps she was referencing this blooming of a preexisting bud.) When my own mother, a nurse and childbirth educator, shared this with me, she was telling a story, a sweet etiological myth that’d yoke us to the motherland. Though I’ve only been twice, I’ve yearned to reconnect with Puerto Rico, where she was born; we once lived there together, when I was in the waters of her womb. Veracity isn’t the point; nor was it a factor in my grandmother’s tales from the archipelago—fantastical memories of spectral visits from ancestors, an earthquake that swallowed a wandering girl—though she insisted on their truth, these quasi-fictional recollections from Borikén (the land’s Indigenous name).

I am drawn to Retiro, to its Boricua matriarch writing her own history. It’s later established in the film that the opening scene, though technically biographical, is woven with Gloria’s artistic manipulations; her directive instructions, exposed to us in Retiro’s multiple channels, make this plain. In a recent conversation, Natalia, whose bedrock is theater, said that she’s moved by what she calls “liveness,” or the coexistence of many lived realities in performance, film, and life, and especially in Puerto Rico. “The last decade of tragedies—and the preceding centuries of colonialism—our mistrust of the government, the importance of telling our own stories: Borikén is a place where fiction and reality have melded,” she explained. This is a concept she explores as a 2021 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, studying ceremonial objects of Haitian Voudoun and Arawak Taíno practices and their inherent connection within a broad view of Caribbean cosmology.

For Retiro, Natalia explained, “I wanted to create a new archive of Puerto Rican histories, one that honors our stories, our myths…[while] simultaneously searching for ways for my mom and I to understand each other. I told her that she could rewrite her story; I wanted to surrender to her storytelling.” This approach is key to Natalia’s method throughout her practice and research: the way reality and its construction commingle, the potential for renewal in a retold narrative. With its alchemical reiteration of the past, Retiro archives an almost-mythical chronology of Gloria over the last several years, equally factual and chimerical. The prismatic film is also a daughter’s heart-centered attempt to bond with her mother through creative collaboration—inverting the typical filmmaker-subject relationship to birth something new.

In 2013, Natalia was studying experimental theater at New York University and reckoning with a fraught realization that befalls so many: I am becoming my mother, both a horror and a blessing. She felt that the distance between New York and Bayamón, Puerto Rico, her hometown, mirrored the space between her and Gloria, their growing generational tension, the miles-long stretch of their shared history. Dabbling with filmmaking upon graduation, Natalia explored the intertwined experience of motherhood and daughterhood and was compelled to work with Gloria herself, to unpack their overlapping traumas and know each other more deeply. After the passing of her mother (Natalia’s grandmother), Gloria was grieving; “She’d lost her origin,” said Natalia. Natalia returned to Puerto Rico in 2015, considering a new project for which Gloria would be muse and collaborator. “I was thinking about theater,” Natalia said. “What if I started working with her in a way that isn’t about this grief or trauma, but about reconstructing history? I was thinking about crafting a fiction from reality, blurring the lines between the two in order to form something new, as opposed to retelling the past. I also feel that Retiro was a conscious attempt to thread myself to my mother, to try to see her not as this person I was in conflict with or simply becoming.” Natalia is part of a growing wave of artists in Borikén reconnecting with their ancestry, reimagining their memories to better comprehend the present. “Mostly,” she explained, “I wanted to remind my mother of her brilliance.”

Gloria was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, “in the fifties,” she told me in a recent interview. She explained that when Natalia, her younger child, was born in 1991, “I was very happy to have a daughter, because that was something I had always desired since I was young. The pregnancy was a little difficult; I had to be followed by a specialist—but finally we got this baby, and I love her very much.” No longer working outside the home and hoping to spend more time with her children, Gloria, who already had a degree in environmental science, continued indulging her other passions and interests. “She tried everything,” said Natalia. “She did metal embossing. She did baking. She was brilliant in everything she did.” In 2007, Gloria fulfilled a longtime dream to take painting classes and in 2009 went back to the University of Puerto Rico to study political science, enrolling in courses in philosophy and Puerto Rican history. She also spent time nurturing her deep-rooted inclination toward visual art and writing. “As life goes on and you gain more experience,” said Gloria, “these concepts are incorporated into who you are. They become part of you.” She later signed up for a cinema course, enriching her knowledge of the medium.

In conceiving of the opening scene of Retiro, in which a marriage dissolves, Natalia had asked her mother to select a “transcendental” moment from her life. They’d make a film about it. Gloria had initially chosen her daughter’s birth, but budget constraints wouldn’t allow for that vision. They selected another turning point, Gloria explained, “a very difficult experience that I was able to get out of. Successfully. Healed.” Long before Natalia and her brother were born, Gloria married young and willfully against her parents’ wishes; when Gloria discussed the eventual divorce with me, she described it as a period of hope and personal metamorphosis, an early heartbreak transposed into strength. She was, she said, “a fighter. Something that may be traumatic can become positive.” Natalia agreed, explaining, “I told her, there’s something that can be worked here, in terms of realigning your relationship to this moment that you might remember as traumatic.” With Gloria behind the camera and her past in front of her, she’s the artist, and history is malleable. Natalia-as-Gloria steps into a bathtub clothed in her wedding dress, as Gloria may have—or not—decades before. She laughs and cries: a euphoric release. Gloria has freed herself.

In 2016, they cowrote and shot the film in Miami, Florida. Natalia, who was living between Miami and Montreal, Canada, moved home after its completion to continue interviewing Gloria about “her process of aging, how she felt about the future, how she felt about the political situation in Puerto Rico.” In the current version of Retiro, these conversations, initially removed in the first cut, are everywhere, interlaced with scenes from Gloria’s short film and snippets from the editing process, including the opening scene’s crucially visible film crew. The unveiling of Retiro’s production renders the fable at its center uncanny—a nucleus nestled in its own creative deliberation, displayed across three simultaneous channels. “There’s some fiction,” Gloria added, referring to her imaginative choices for the script and her awareness that the woman in the film “is not me anymore.” The seemingly organic (sometimes arid) realism of documentary is inflected with the women’s meditations and the disclosure of their process. Together, they form a tender love letter from Natalia and Gloria to each other. No moment is presented without the mechanics or questions that shaped it: Gloria in the garden, florid flowers and rain-lashed tiles and her daughter’s subtitled queries in adjacent frames. Gloria afloat in the sea, astride shots of the shoreline and a small blazing sun, Natalia’s cues audible. The central periscopic performance features, in one frame, Natalia as young Gloria; in another is Gloria the director with headphones and a cigarette; and in a third, we see Natalia asking, in Spanish, “Why did you pick this moment?” It’s heart fluttering to peer behind the curtain.

“Retiro became a form of proximity, a way for us to come closer and dig deep in our collective and individual history,” Natalia said. “I didn’t know I was going to be holding so much space for her pain, even embodying it. That act of conscious surrender changed the way that I relate to her.” The film’s apparent layering permitted Gloria and Natalia to see themselves and each other: their shared creative agency, their reverence for their home, their unspooling of the past, and the intimacy of parsing it together. Gloria’s lyricism, Natalia’s insistence. Midway through the film, Gloria holds blush-pink roses at the cemetery, her words captioned in a bordering frame: “Your grandmother used to say she was waiting for her death. I’m not waiting for my death. I’m waiting for an evolution.” In another, Natalia asks, “Would you have liked your life to be different?”“Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Things happen.” Gloria enumerates her desires, how their urgency deepens with time: “I want to swim, lose weight, quit smoking. Enjoy life more. Get rid of these shadows that torment me.”

Over time, there’s a gentle but perceptible mood shift, particularly in footage shot after Hurricanes Irma and Maria in late 2017. “My mom told me there was a gap between the people we were then and now,” said Natalia, “filled with political revolutions, a pandemic, earthquakes, hurricanes.” In these later scenes, the pair travel through the fog of Borikén’s mountaintops, wade in its waters; Puerto Rico is the film’s third character. The two women transform into a kind of parabola, an intergenerational continuum of synchronous roles. Natalia instructs her mother, “Look at the sea.” They irritate each other. They grow closer.

This past summer and fall, Retiro was on view at Hidrante, a project space in San Juan, part of Natalia’s solo exhibition Libreto escrito, aún no existe (Written script, it does not exist yet)—the project’s first presentation in Puerto Rico. The film’s channels were projected onto three “screens”—vertical blinds, in front of windows—viewable from two rocking chairs, “the way it’s meant to be seen,” Natalia said. “You have to come to the space and make yourself available for it.” Hidrante’s space was once a home, and its former domesticity is palpable. In what felt like the dim evening quiet of a living room, a viewer’s eyes would’ve floated over the screens, absorbing Retiro incrementally. At the time of this writing, the exhibition is still on view with an upcoming component that, like the title, doesn’t exist yet. Gloria and Natalia are currently engaging in performative exercises, led by the latter’s cousin, Angel Blanco, a choreographer, dancer, and therapist. Angel is “extracting gestures from Gloria’s body language and creating a glossary,” which Natalia will memorize and somatically incorporate into balletic gestures. Natalia explained: “It’s an attempt to translate the filmmaking process into a live performance and shift the roles pre-established by the dynamic in Retiro,” with Natalia again becoming her mother, “beyond verbal dialogue.” This time, Gloria is not only director but also cinematographer, holding the camera and filming her daughter.

Near the screening room, Natalia deemed a section “Gloria’s Room”—officially titled Estamos desarmadas, meciéndonos en un columpio de ilusiones (“We are disarmed, rocking on a swing of illusions), a written observation by Gloria—decorated with furniture from her parents’ home and painted a warm, deep burgundy, like a gut. A 35mm slide projector shines images of archival materials onto the wall: photographs of an adolescent Gloria, Natalia’s fetal sonogram, Gloria’s illustrations and her footnotes scribbled across an early script of the film. Many of Gloria’s notes are lapidary; they possess a philosophical quality with their reflections on filmmaking and existence. “The awareness of what one has, of what the time of Retiro is, has changed,” reads one. Some allude to the psychogeographic terrain of Borikén: “…Maps, of the Caribbean region, with all the underground geological faults, that raise us again and make us remember that we are very vulnerable.” It seems Gloria has divulged her heart on paper, though we might just be reading her poetry: “Here we meet, facing the fiction we’ve created of our lives.” Her words impart a written archive, to rhyme with Retiro’s cinematic one, of mother, daughter, and the archipelago of Puerto Rico, itself a matriarch. One reads like a melody: “Because we all change / in the course of time / and we incorporate into our life / irrelevant things that mark us / but there are other things that remain essential / which go to the core of who you really are.” As the title credits roll, the coquis’ nocturnal song resurfaces, recalling a tender maternal tradition: a lullaby.

Slow Dancing with Strangers for Springerin Mag

Sofía Gallisá Muriente & Natalia Lassalle-Morillo

The title of our film Foreign in a Domestic Sense refers to the oxymoron used by the United States Supreme Court in 1901 as part of the ruling that gave legal sanction to US colonization, identifying Puerto Rico as an “unincorporated possession” and speaking to our uniquely strange relationship. Our film was born out of a desire to get closer to and spend time with the fastest-growing Puerto Rican community in the US while placing our distinct artistic practices in dialogue and reflecting on the waves of displacement and hybridization that have shaped our history. Diasporic memory is fragmented and non-linear, and also foreign – past, present and future coexist, similar to how images and memories unfold in dreams.

For three years, we talked and listened closely to Puerto Ricans living in the central region of Florida, US, who shared their accounts of how Hurricane María and the larger political and economic crisis in the archipelago had forced them to leave, and how they contended with their new reality and surroundings. Our challenge was crafting a poetic visual language to accompany these stories and move past disaster porn toward other possibilities of self-representation. The result is a four-channel film that plays with structures and genres for documenting this migratory experience, woven together through a chorus of testimonies of people we met and spoke to along the way.

Although our project is grounded in a long research process, we are both very intuitive in how we shoot and edit, and we committed ourselves to fostering complicity with the people who participated in our project. We allowed the interviewees’ stories to guide our filming plans and our road trip through Florida. Our aim was to find and create connections by negotiating the distance between experiences we heard from others and our own impressions during the filming process. Since we share a background in theater, collective creation and improvisation were already embedded in the way we work. We experimented with different formal approaches, melding fiction, reality, and speculation with home movies, high-definition video, and hand-developed Super8 film. The structure of the film was inspired by Italo Calvino’s 1979 novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, where a reader starts a new book in each chapter. This led us to conceptualize our piece as four potential beginnings to a film about the Puerto Rican diasporic experience in Central Florida through different stylistic and narrative approaches.

The formation of a community responds in part to the landscape and infrastructure of a place. In Central Florida with its sprawling streets and car-culture, we found out many people felt isolated. Others we spoke to mentioned that instead of feeling a part of a Puerto Rican community, they were more connected to a greater Caribbean and Latin American diaspora. The Pulse massacre in 2016 was the tragedy that first garnered visibility to the recent Puerto Rican migration wave to Orlando and these wider cultural diasporic alliances. It also spoke to gender and sexuality as additional reasons for migrating. The shooting happened during salsa night at the club, precisely the kind of social setting created for displaced queer Latinx people in order to find each other in a new city. During our research process, we found that this horrible event had been memorialized in problematic ways, white-washed and disneyfied, by the city government, the club owners and others. As a loving homage to those lost in the Pulse shooting, we decided to center the relationship between movement and freedom, showing the purple neon circle that remained on the club’s facade, yet refusing to participate in the commodification of grief.

The dance floor has always been an important space of resistance for queer people: to be free in their bodies and together in community. For us, this embodied defense of joy is also emblematic of the ways in which Puerto Ricans have survived culturally and emotionally through all sorts of catastrophes. We conceived this film departing from the belief that diasporas are engaged in collective practices that reorganize what community and nation means, and push the evolution and expansion of our shared identity.

In our film, we envisioned our collaborators as dancers who were trying to orient themselves on this new dance floor – Central Florida. We imagined a safe space that allows Puerto Ricans to “enter the risk of being together,” as performance scholar Ramón Rivera Servera describes the Queer Latin Nightclub. This reflection inspired the final scene of our film – a post-apocalyptic dance floor in a Tampa swamp. We brought together a group of people who were partly strangers to each other and invited them to dance slowly, finding comfort and warmth in each other. Borrowing an instruction work from Yoko Ono, we directed them to feel each other’s pulse, confirming each other’s presence and liveness.

For Puerto Ricans who oppose US colonialism, like us, the future is inextricably tied to an ongoing quest for freedom that may begin with ourselves and extend into our communities. The decolonization of the body is essential to the process of liberation. This holds a double meaning in our film: speaking to the body on the dance floor as well as the body that leaves one country for another without assimilating. Imagining the future is additionally complicated by the current ecological catastrophe which will soon turn Florida into an island. As the water that lurks throughout the state rises, the same kind of disaster that pushed Puerto Ricans to Florida will once again threaten them, like it continues to threaten us in the Caribbean. While our film engages this reality through metaphors and other poetic devices, it becomes increasingly difficult to find solace from the devastation and suffering caused by systems of planetary exploitation.

Documentar lo indocumentable

por Natalia Lassalle-Morillo; publicado en el libro "Observatorio de Lagunas" de Sofía Gallisá Muriente

En el Smithsonian, la experiencia de habitar el archivo es un ritual indocumentable. Meses de coordinación y trabajo invisible por correo electrónico te aseguran acceso a espacios que parecen ultrasecretos. Cada museo tiene burocracias distintas. Para filmar en las colecciones del Museo Nacional de Historia Natural, hay que someter una solicitud a una junta de revisión, que se tarda 30-60 días en responder. El departamento de comunicaciones determina si tu filmación es legal o ilegal. El motivo de mis filmaciones fue cuestionado, pero por suerte pude asegurarles que mi pietaje sería utilizado solamente como investigación. Por esto no verán imágenes de la bóveda junto a este escrito. Tras el tedioso proceso de permisos y confirmaciones, entras a la bóveda fría, donde se preservan culturas eternamente. Te pones guantes y te vuelves una experta sin saber nada. Abres gabinetes y atraviesas un portal a un pasado inimaginable. 

El Bureau of American Anthropology envió a Jesse Walter Fewkes a explorar la nueva posesión de “Porto Rico” en 1901. A lo largo de la primera década del siglo XX escribió uno de los libros de arqueología más reconocidos de esa época, The Aborigines of Puerto Rico and Neighboring Islands. Un nuevo amigo puertorriqueño que conocí en DC me contó que, irónicamente, a Fewkes no le interesaba Puerto Rico porque allí no habían “indios vivos”.

Decidí revisar los exhaustivos diarios de sus viajes a Puerto Rico. Aunque me pesaba darle importancia a su mirada sobre nuestro paisaje, me conmovió leer que veía a Cataño desde la Bahía de San Juan, y que, en el horizonte, lograba avistar a Bayamón anidado en las colinas, algo que le parecía muy hermoso. Revisé sus fotografías de estas fechas y sentí el humedal del patio de mi casa en Bayamón luego de una lluvia imprevista. Experimenté la extraña sensación de reconocer lo familiar tan fuera de contexto. El diario de Fewkes se está cayendo en cantos, pero aún puedes leer su misión cuasi detectivesca de cazar “piezas” indígenas caribeñas para que formaran parte del patrimonio cultural del Smithsonian. También hay chismes arqueológicos de la época: sus frustrantes visitas a Agustín Stahl y la infructuosa búsqueda del libro de éste, que “Salvador Brau dice no es fiable”; sus visitas a Arecibo y Guayanilla para ver al Padre Nazario, quien parecía evadirlo; las cartas que le escribió Eladio Pabón Vargas ofreciéndole su propia colección arqueológica a un precio módico; el hecho de que soldados y oficiales coleccionaban antigüedades que los “nativos” vendían baratas en la montaña. Fewkes, quien atravesaba la isla buscando al indígena “auténtico”, presentía que el Yunque era uno de los pocos lugares donde se preservaba la cultura taína. Decía que, de lejos, el Yunque parecía una sola montaña, pero cuando uno se acercaba, se topaba con múltiples, y… con “un país roto, casi imposible de atravesar”. 

El 7 de enero de 1903, Fewkes escribe sobre su visita a un barrio en Utuado. Como pensaba que los bateyes eran cementerios, presentía que eran el lugar ideal donde excavar, si era el caso que los indígenas se enterraban con sus pertenencias. Fewkes describe el proceso de excavación: los huesos rotos, el suelo húmedo, la cerámica rota, incompleta. “Mis excavaciones en el lugar de baile cerca de Utuado revelaron que: 1) los personajes mortuorios en los pequeños montículos colindaban con los ‘juegos de bola’; 2) esta cerámica se enterraba con los muertos en sus tumbas; 3) los esqueletos estaban pobremente preservados… los cuerpos se encontraron cinco pies debajo de la superficie del montículo, en una tierra húmeda y fértil. Los extendían a lo largo y boca arriba. No se encontró una cantidad considerable de cerámica”.

La única manera de desentrañar el proceso de trabajar con el archivo –con sus tensiones, telarañas, fantasmas, capas de complejidad – es dimensionándolo en el momento vivo. Al leer la descripción de Fewkes sobre la excavación en los bateyes, sus quejas sobre la “mala preservación” de los huesos, y su remoción de las “pocas” piezas arqueológicas, sentí el vómito subir a mi garganta y las lágrimas correr detrás de mi mascarilla. En este diario que se hacía polvo, se evidenciaba una violencia histórica que muches sabemos pero rara vez podemos leer desde su fuente. Recordé que el Caribe fue diseñado para el extractivismo, y que los archivos te llevan a una experiencia comunal con el fantasma del enemigo.