3-channel video installation with sound, parabolic shaped seating

4k video, 16mm film, 8mm film | 60 minutes

*for screener, write me at [email protected]

Part I was co-devised and co-authored in collaboration with:

Erica Ballester Nina Lucía Rodríguez Raquel Rodríguez Emma Suárez-Báez

Chorus by Xenia Rubinos

Exhibition gallery artworks developed in collaboration with Luis Vázquez O'neill and María "Lulú" Varona .

En Parábola/Conversations on Tragedy is a reassemblage of the Greek myth of Antigone in collaboration with a cast of non-professional actors who reside in Puerto Rico and in New York City’s Puerto Rican diasporic community. Developed through a multi-year process of collaborative theatrical rehearsal and experimental filmmaking, the work emerged through the cast’s revising, re-writing, and performing of the myth of Antigone inspired by their lived and inherited experiences of migration and belonging.Taking the form of a multi-channel film installation and a live performance series, En Parábola seeks to connect these communities after decades of geographical fragmentation, colonial erasure, dispossession, and cumulative environmental, economic, and political tragedies.

The first chapter of En Parábola is a multi-channel film that chronicles the New York City-based cast reimagining the myth of Antigone from their own perspectives. The film weaves together fictional and nonfictional narratives, layering documentation of the rehearsal process with behind-the-scenes footage and staged reenactments performed by the cast themselves.

Inspired by the original discourse of dramatic tragedy as a forum for communal catharsis, Parts I and II of En Parábola use theater and rehearsal as a platform through which to bring two casts together. Natalia and her collaborators deconstruct the Greek dramatic structure, using it as a creative device to explore the complexities of the Puerto Rican diasporic experience and the interconnected challenges faced by diverse migratory journeys. Together, they imagine a future for the play’s mythological characters wherein they survive the tragedy—a future that aligns with a Puerto Rican post-disaster imaginary in which new definitions of sovereignty and freedom are possible.

Through participatory efforts to reshape collective memory, En Parábola proposes theatrical rehearsal as a site of speculation and reunion, where Puerto Ricans can revise, unlearn, experiment, and build narratives, woven from their lived experiences. Re-envisioning sovereignty as an affective citizenship that exists beyond geographical boundaries, this project is fundamentally an invitation to exercise our right to imagination and the potentialities of fantasy and fiction.

The first chapter of En Parábola/Conversations on Tragedy was presented at Amant in Brooklyn from March 14th-June 23rd 2024 as part of Rituals of Speaking, a film-led series exploring how artists represent the voices of others through collective storytelling. It was curated by Natalia Viera Salgado and comissioned by Amant with additional support from the Mellon Foundation and Princeton University.

The second chapter of En Parábola chronicles the reimagining of Antigone from the perspectives of both the Puerto Rico-based and the New York-based cast, and culminates in a live theatrical performance that reunites both casts to adapt their scripts to the stage. Building on the multi-year process of collaboration carried out between both territories, Part II will be presented at Abrons Art Center and MAC (Puerto Rico ) in 2026.

Developed in collaboration with Sofía Gallisá Muriente

Installation design by Carlos J. Soto

Installation with six videos, archival documents, loaned objects from the Teodoro Vidal Collection at the National Museum of American History , and collaborations with Amara Abdal Figueroa, Carola Cintrón Moscoso, Rosaura Rodríguez, Leila Mattina, Beatriz Lizardi, Karla Claudio Betancourt and Héctor L. Pérez Barreto.

Sofía Gallisá Muriente and Natalia Lassalle-Morillo's Unruly Subjects examines the Smithsonian Institution as a home for Puerto Rican cultural heritage. In 2022, as Smithsonian Artist Research Fellows, they gained access to the Teodoro Vidal Collection of Puerto Rican History at the National Museum of American History, and to Indigenous objects from Puerto Rico collected by Jesse Walter Fewkes at the National Museum of Natural History. Fewkes was a Smithsonian antropologist sent to Puerto Rico as the Spanish-American War (1898) ended to collect Indigenous objects from the US's new "possession." Vidal was a Puerto Rican government official and self-taught historian whose gift of more than 3,000 works from the archipelago constituted one of the largest donations in Smithsonian history.

Gallisá Muriente and Lassalle-Morillo's research coincided with the establishment of Smithsonian's Shared Stewardship and Ethical Returns policy, prompting them to investigate its implications for Puerto Rican cultural heritage in diaspora and how their work could contribute to facilitating its return. Through a series of 6 films, the artists examine the histories of accession into the imperial archive and trace these objects back to their places of origin, contrasting institutional spaces with the living histories and practices preserved in Puerto Rico by countless individuals.

Conceived with theater designer Carlos J. Soto, Unruly Subjects reimagines a storage facility by presenting objects from the Teodoro Vidal collection alongside works by contemporary Puerto Rican artists using clay, cotton, and natural pigments-materials that have been integral to the archipelago's inhabitants for centuries.

This project forms part of the 2024 Cooper Hewitt Triennial, and was developed with the support of Headlands Center of the Arts.

Image credits for Installation Images: Photo: Elliot Goldstein © Smithsonian Institution

Since 2022, the artists Natalia Lassalle Morillo and Sofía Gallisá Muriente have researched Puerto Rican collections and holdings at the Smithsonian Institution, examining their histories of accession, how they live in off-site storage, and the possibilities of mediating their return to the people and places they belong to. On the occasion of the VLC Forum 2024: Correct History*, the artists’ performance lecture Tactics of Transmissionreflects on their experiences as unruly colonial subjects navigating the imperial archive, as well as on the historical gossip, findings, and revelations from their research process. This program is co-presented with The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center as part of Historias, a multi-year initiative exploring Latinx New York's transformative impact on the city.

Saturday, March 23, 2024 | 5-6pm

On the occasion of Joint Custody curated by Amanda Nudelman, Puerto Rico-based mother and daughter artists Natalia Lassalle-Morillo and Gloria Morillo activate their collaborative video installation Retiro (2019) through an improvisational performance. They dissect scenes from the film in real time, reversing and re-performing their roles as actor and director to allow new narrative “truths” and “fictions” to unfold.

HD Video with sound | 60 minutes

For screener, email me at [email protected]

Passage of the Spiral (Pasadizo en Espiral) follows students and artists separated by real and imagined borders, but united by the need to tell stories. From Santo Domingo Yanhuiltán to California to the liminal space of the theater, we experience transnational migration and creative collaboration through the lens of young people based in the Mixteca Region of México and Los Angeles, California. These journeys emerge from a concentric point of a spiral – Yanhuitlán and its ghosts – addressing the complexities of representation, of who is telling whose story and why.

The film draws upon the multi-year creation of the play El Camino Donde Nosotros Lloramos (The Road Where We Weep) led by celebrated Mexican theater company Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol.

Screenings

2024 Redcat Los Angeles, CA

Super8 film shot in Florida and hand-developed with water from Jayuya, Puerto Rico | 9:51 min

Part of the multi-channel film, Foreign in a domestic sense.

Super 8 film still transferred to fabric

Simulacro was made from images originally shot in Super8 and developed by hand as part of Foreign in a Domestic Sense, a 4-channel film produced by Natalia Lassalle-Morillo and Sofía Gallisá Muriente in Central Florida. Our images accompany and connect the experiences of people who are part of the fastest growing Puerto Rican population in the United States, speculating on how diasporas formulate futures.  Simulacro is an image of Epcot, the theme park in Orlando modeled by world fairs to celebrate technological innovation, that produces fantasies of the future that overflow throughout the territory of Florida. The white mark on the image reveals the hidden labor of hand development, and the invisible processes that are carried out to produce an image, as well as the work of thousands of workers, many of them Puerto Rican, in charge of “sustaining the magic" at Disney.

This work was exhibited alongside Veinticinco pies bajo el agua for the exhibition, "Once Upon a Time", at El Kilometro, in San Juan.

Super 8 film still transferred to fabric

Veinticinco pies bajo el agua was made from images originally shot in Super8 and developed by hand as part of Foreign in a Domestic Sense, a 4-channel film produced by Natalia Lassalle-Morillo and Sofía Gallisá Muriente in Central Florida. Our images accompany and connect the experiences of people who are part of the fastest growing Puerto Rican population in the United States, speculating on how diasporas formulate futures. 

Veinticinco pies bajo el agua evokes the ubiquitous presence of water in Florida, an omen of the future that suggests the state will soon become an archipelago. The drape of the fabric creates a fluid, watery sensation, with a pattern that distorts the reflections of a spring in Apopka.

Veinticinco pies bajo el agua was shown alongside Simulacro for the exhibition, "Once Upon a Time", at El Kilometro, in San Juan, in February 2023.

4-channel installation with sound | 32mins

4k, Hi8 and HD video with hand developed Super8 film

For screener, email me at [email protected]

Foreign In a Domestic Sense is a constellation of testimonies and imaginaries of Puerto Ricans who have migrated from this US colony in the Caribbean to Central Florida in recent years. Conjured by visual artists Natalia Lassalle-Morillo and Sofía Gallisá Muriente, the film is the result of an extensive research and filming process that placed their distinct diasporic experiences and artistic methodologies in dialogue. Their images evoke, accompany and connect the lived experiences of people who are part of the fastest-growing Puerto Rican population in the United States, displaced as a result of political and environmental disasters in the archipelago. Just as continuous states of emergency have unsettled space and time, the artists explore visual languages rooted in the context of Florida to deepen the fragmentation, building a choir of people, places and memories. The four channel film layers fictional and non-fictional narrative forms, high definition video and Super8 film, speculating about how community is created anew through performance and recreation. Staging a dance floor in the darkness of a swamp, the artists envision an intimate space where their cast members can find each other and learn to move freely. As the ubiquitous presence of water in times of rising tides suggests that Florida will soon become an island, the film addresses the entanglement between climate grief and human displacement through an open-ended visual poem.

The film’s title refers to the oxymoron used by the United States Supreme Court in 1901 as part of the ruling that gave legal sanction to the US colonization of foreign territories, identifying Puerto Rico as an unincorporated possession and speaking to a uniquely strange relationship to belonging.

Exhibited and Presented at:

2024 Dazibao, Montréal, Québec

2023 National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian, DC

2023 Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Santurce, Puerto Rico

2022 La Tierra Tiembla, curated by Isabel Rojas for Oaxaca Cine, Oaxaca, México

2022 Nexus: Video and Media Art from the Caribbean , curated by Sasha Dees for Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, Taiwan

2022 Counter Flows , Batalha Centro de Cinema, curated by Almudena Escobar López and Margarida Mendes, Porto, Portugal

2022 Flaherty Seminar, Colgate, NY

2022 UNRAVELING THE (UNDER-) DEVELOPMENT COMPLEX OR TOWARDS A POST- (UNDER-) DEVELOPMENT INTERDEPENDENCE, SAAVY Contemporary, Berlin, Germany

2022 Art Pop Montréal, Berlin, Germany

2022 Blackstar Film Festival, Philadelphia - Audience Award for Best Experimental Film

2022 Amant Foundation, Brooklyn, NY

2021 Constant Storm; Art from Puerto Rico and the Diaspora, curated by Noel Smith and Christian Vivero-Fauné

16 mm + HD Video with sound | 45 minutes

For screener, email me at [email protected]

Marigloria Palma is a Puerto Rican poet, playwright, and interdisciplinary artist who spent 20 years of her life in Los Angeles, observing Puerto Rico’s colonial struggle from a distance, and embodying the experience of displacement and in-betweenness that comes with simultaneously inhabiting two politically and culturally opposed homes. Through an intuitive filmmaking process carried out with CalArts artists in Los Angeles and by Lassalle-Morillo in Puerto Rico, this film explores Marigloria’s writings as a poetic act of resistance, crafting a cinematic and performative atlas that meditates on the colonial relationship between Puerto Rico & the United States, and investigates how a territory’s ecology, collective memory, and cosmology affect the consciousness of those who inhabit it.

Director’s Note

The poems, letters and written works that conform this filmic experiment elicit an island in crisis. I collected them from Marigloria’s 1978 poetry book The Night, and Other Electric Flowers, title this filmwork references; from the poetry book “Versos de Cada Día” (Everyday Verses , published in 1980); and from letters I found while digging through Marigloria’s collection at the Puerto Rican National Archive. (The letters referenced in this film were in a file called “Interesting Letters I Sent or Received from Important People”).

In these selected works, Marigloria writes about a Puerto Rico “crucified by the sea” that surrounds it– a sea that she also wants to “set on fire”. When I think of a “sea on fire”, I imagine a red sea. This red sea automatically reminds me of:

“No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one, red”.

A sea on fire, a sea full of blood, a sea with not enough water to wash away the red from guilty hands. I’m reminded of Vieques [1941-2001], Cerro Maravilla [1978], 4645 deaths caused by Hurricane María [2017], 500 years of colonial oppression by Spain, and then the United States. While developing this project, I learned of the Puerto Rico trench, the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean. This region is associated with the most negative gravity anomaly on earth, and is also responsible for the swarm of earthquakes that threatens the Puerto Rican archipelago since January 2020. Gravity, a red ocean, Marigloria’s “Night”– all erotic forces that pull us, regardless of distance, towards this Caribbean axis. They are emotions, gut feelings, stomach grumblings, that cannot be explained with logic. Beyond logic, Marigloria offers us her “deranged, sensual, obscene and fertile” Night.

This project is an experiment guided by the premise of rehearsing for a film that is continuously in-progress. Our goal was to carry out an intuitive filmmaking process ( a process that at times felt like an experimental performative ethnographic experiment) that translates the extensive rehearsal framework characteristic of theatre making processes to a filmmaking process. What happens when a film is continuously in progress? The role of the performer transforms from one who embodies to one who observes. The actors aren’t only performers, but cinematographers, assistant directors, writers, lighting designers and set designers. They are a one-person band, trying to defy gravity during times of uncertainty.

Live Theater | 75 minutes

Antígona is a live theatrical reconstruction of Sophokles’ Antigone that considers the story’s current weight on our political and ancestral histories. Presented at the Walt Disney Modular Theatre at the California Institute of the Arts, this adaptation of Anne Carson’s translation of the greek text focuses on the simultaneity of experiences, perspectives and instances that coexist during an event of collective catastrophe. The set design serves as a live installation that takes over the vast space of the Walt Disney Modular Theatre and presents a ruined Thebes that is currently under construction. The audience transits multiple performance spaces following the Guard, a female entity who witnesses and uncovers the mystery within the histories of the women of House of Oedipus. Conceived in collaboration with an all female, international design team, Antígona brings us to question our relationship to our ancestry, the privilege of remembrance, and the structures established by humans to understand the conditions and logic of a past that weighs on our present.

Director's Note

Sophokles’ Antígona is a play that has been done and redone for centuries. The words in translation resound in the hall of theatre spaces, classrooms, forests, cemeteries, homes, churches, rehearsal rooms, theatre history. The spirits of those who have spoken these words are present every time an actor speaks them. We all have our history with these words. Escaping these spirits and this history is an arduous task. Our commitment is to embrace both. 

In this production, we are utilizing two translations Carson wrote of this play. As a base, we are utilizing her translation of Antigone, translated in 2015 for Ivo Van Hove’s production of the play , intersected by her more experimental adaptation of the text, called "Antigonik", which precedes this other translation. Through the binding of these two texts, we hope that we can be in conversation with the inherited history of these words and those who speak them.

What first drew me to Anne Carson’s translation was the simplicity and straightforwardness of its language. In her translator’s note to “Antigonik”, Carson quotes Beckett on his own aspirations towards language: “to bore hole after hole in it until what cowers behind it seeps through”. It is, in this action of boring through , where our tragedy is contained.

The tragedy is a machine with a moral agenda. We discovered that Sophokles constructed this text with such precision that each action is meant to be experienced at a specific moment in time. Time then piles up on itself, functioning in a strange manner that is not meant to make sense to us in 2019. In our process we have been investigating the tactics each one of the individuals on stage has to deal with the chaos evoked by this piling up of time, which leads to the inevitable cycle of catastrophe we witness.

Who gets to escape this piling up of time?

Antigone? Eurydike? The messenger? The performers ? The audience? The director?

I hope you are able to find your answer, or your question, in your own experience of witnessing.

HD Video | 35 minutes

holguín, hialeah follows the story of Alvis Hecheverría, a former secretary and housewife who decides to leave Cuba for the first time at age 81 after the passing of her husband, relocating to Hialeah, Florida. Throughout her process of adapting to her new life in Florida, we conducted interviews and followed her daily routine as a new immigrant in Hialeah. As part of this process, we visited the spaces in Miami that allude to a Cuban imaginary, attempting to recreate memories of her life in Cuba in these spaces. After two years of filming and a theatrical debut, Alvis and I decided to trace these recreations and memories to their original locations in her birth city of Santiago and her hometown of Holguín in Cuba. In these visits, we documented her reunions with family and old friends, but also faced the transitoriness of these spaces, which had changed vastly over time.

This film was presented as part of the exhibition: "It will never become that familiar to you" at Oolite Arts, in Miami, and was curated by Angélica Arbelaez.

HD Video | 21 minutes

for full mock-up, contact [email protected]

The act of revolting, of shifting how one moves around axis is one that depends on a collective shift of a consciousness. This shift seems to be one that does not belong to one particular generation, but that is inherited and therefore lies embedded in our unconscious.

The act of coming together in order to materialize this collective shift is what some call a revolution. Yet the act of revolving is erotic and metaphysical, and it reuintes material conditions ( place, location, home, work, economy — all determined by what we refer to as the political circumnstances— in order to evoke a force that lies beyond us. For this to happen, different events must take place at the same time in order to paralyze an established notion of time. It happens like a lightning jolt and at times is finished before our logic can register it.

We are at times only left with the resonance.

Last summer, Puerto Ricans were able to achieve a massive gesture: a collective need to revolve in order to achieve a collective goal. This gesture was unprecedented in history. I had the opportunity of experiencing this gesture viscerally along with many other thousands who came together for these three or-so weeks. I arrived at the events that took place – protests, celebrations, marches, manifestations ( on motorbikes, on horses, with reggaeton, with yoga, aquatic, the list goes on and on and on) with my camera, with the humble goal to document. But my body attempt to ‘keep up’ with the multiplicity of experiences and with the rapid rhythm of this mobilization interrupted my desire to document. Most of the time the camera was left unattended, and most of what I captured was accidental. This film is comprised of this footage, shot during these three weeks of protests.

This film does not focus on the specifics or the outcomes of a protest. It does not focus on the success of the failure of these either. It focuses on the intimate encounters I had while navigating the landscape of these manifestations as a body with a camera , unaware, but radically present in live time.The installation is an attempt at deconstructing the gest of the documentary or a document of a live event, focusing instead on my intimate account of transiting the space, the distorted image, my body’s relationship to the camera , and the sound captured — all by accident, aiming to reconstruct the erotic , chaotic and disorienting experience of simultaneity inherent in the act of revolving,

[ for spanish ] —– >

////

El acto de la revolución , de cómo uno se mueve alrededor de un axis, depende de un cambio de conciencia colectivo. Este cambio no le pertenece a una generación en particular, pero parece ser heredado a través de las generaciones hasta que se le otorga a la que se manifiesta.

Me gusta pensar que este acto de revolución es un acto erótico que evoca una experiencia metafísica de las condiciones materiales —lugar, geografía, hogar, economía, y muchas otras más que reunidas son los que consideramos nuestra ‘condición’ política—para evocar una energía en nuestro subconsciente que existe más allá de nosotros. Para que esto suceda, muchos eventos deben suceder a la misma vez para paralizar nuestra noción establecida de lo que es “tiempo”. Suceden como un relámpago, y a su vez termina antes de que nuestra lógica pueda registrarlos. A veces nos quedamos sólo con la resonancia de estos.

El verano pasado, un evento sin precedente sucede en Puerto Rico, donde el colectivo se puso de acuerdo para llevar a cabo un gesto enorme. Tuve la oportunidad de vivir estos eventos en cuerpo. Llegué a muchos de estos eventos (protestas, manifestaciones, de toda índole: en caballo, en lancha, en jetski, de yoga, con reggaeton combativo, entre un sinnúmero más) con una cámara, con la humilde misión de documentar. Pero mi cuerpo no podía manejar el ritmo acelerado a la multiplicidad de experiencias que estaban sucediendo al mismo tiempo. Muchas veces dejaba desatendida la cámara y casi todo el pietaje que logré capturar fue totalmente accidental.

La mayoría de este film está compuesto de pietaje grabado durantes estas tres semanas de julio en puerto rico. No se enfoca en los resultados específicos de esta protestas ni en cuán exitosas fueron. Se enfoca en vez en los encuentros íntimos que sucedían mientras navegaba las manifestaciones con una cámara como un cuerpo totalmente incapaz de reconocer lo que estaba capturando, pero radicalmente presente en el espacio. Espero a través de todo este pietaje accidental reconstruir la simultaneidad erótica del acto de revolverse.

3-channel HD video w/ sound projected unto vertical blind curtains | 40 minutes

For screener, email me at [email protected] or watch at KADIST

Retiro is a rendering, in prose and performance, of the life and memories of Gloria, the artist’s own mother, through interviews, rushes, and reenactments staged by Lassalle-Morillo herself. We explore the intimate notions of memory and inheritance as the work links three, and more, generations of women in Lassalle-Morillo’s family together across space and time. A film within a film, this three-channel portrait combines the scripted film she and her mother made together, behind-the-scenes shots of that film’s production, and interviews with her mother on gendered familial expectations and aging in Puerto Rico. Lassalle-Morillo’s meta approach to story-telling unpacks her relationship to her mother, demonstrating how maternal trauma, history, and myth are made and inherited through disjointed narratives.

After her grandmother’s death, Lassalle- Morillo decided to interview her mother, 62 at the time, about memories of her youth, aging, grief, and her outlook on the future. After several months of interviews, Lassalle-Morillo and her mother decided to make a film together. Gloria had narrative authorship of the script since the film’s focus was not its veracity, but rather how she decided to rewrite this memory.

Staged in everyday domestic life, Retiro is a cinematic amalgam of stories. For Gloria, it is the experience of re-directing her past; for Natalia, it is the process of embodying these recreations, directed by her mother, in real-time; and for both, it is a collaboration that seeks to renegotiate an inherited experience of memory through different experiences of remembering. There is no interest in distinguishing truth and story, but rather an invitation to relate to history from the perspective of others, considering that fiction not only depends on who builds it but on who interprets it. Each presentation of this piece changes and responds to its context, reflecting the very act and experience of remembering.

The three films of this multi-channel work play synchronously, offering multiple simultaneous perspectives of one same moment in time: Gloria’s memory reenacted and performed by her daughter, Natalia; Gloria’s perspective as she directs Natalia in the re-scripting of her past; and interviews and visits throughout the Puerto Rican archipelago, shot during the 7-year production process. These three film channels are projected unto vertical blind curtains, which allude to the domestic space where most of these interviews took place: Gloria's home.

NOW KADIST Video Library

Mira el Mar: Reflections Natalia Lassalle-Morillo's Retiro by Monica Uszerowicz, published on Burnaway Magazine, 2021

2024 Dig where you stand , curated by Delali Ayiyi, KADIST/African Artists' Alliance, Cotonou, Benín

2024 Joint Custody, SlashArt, curated by Amanda Nudelman, San Francisco, CA

2023 22a Bienal Sesc_Videobrasil ,Sao Paulo, Brasil ; Curated by Raphael Fonseca and Renée Akitelek Mboya

2021 Libreto escrito, aún no existe, Solo Show, Hidrante, Puerto Rico

2020 Los Angeles Latin American Cinematheque, Los Angeles, CA

2019 Will you still love me tomorrow?, Seoul Museum of Art, Korea

2018 Fonderie Darling, Montréal, QC

2018 Titi Lulu's home in Bayamón Puerto Rico, sponsored by Beta-Local in Bayamón, Puerto Rico

Live Performance | 30 minutes

Based on conversations with my mother as we discussed a selection of Greek tragedies, this first iteration of “En Parábola / Conversations on Tragedy” aims to reconstruct a fragmented portrait of Puerto Rican history and quotidian life through my mother’s perspective, resulting in a performance that merges fiction, traditional narrative and autobiography. This performance was inspired by Anne Carsons’ essay “The Gender of Sound”, by the clandestine festivals carried out by the women of Lesbos in the outskirts of the city, and by the “Ololyga”, an embodied, ritualistic scream that channels extreme pain and pleasure, and which was emitted by women during these festivals. Following this framework, my mother and I explored her voice, revealing an archive of silenced histories.

This iteration was presented in Galería Diagonal in Santurce in June 2018, and made in collaboration with Gloria María Morillo.

3-channel film w/ sound projected on abaca & piña fiber curtains

42 minutes

La Ruta, the three-channel video installation by Natalia Lassalle-Morillo follows the Panoramic Route, a now weakened infrastructure that meanders through natural landscapes and off-road destinations on the island of Puerto Rico. The Panoramic Route was designed for residents and tourists to connect with the traditional center of the island, as part of a political agenda to modernize the country through infrastructure and social programs. Today, the highway is notorious for dismal road conditions, resulting in isolation between more densely populated metropolitan. This historical context inspired Lassalle-Morillo to conduct research and ride the Panoramic Route with artists Christopher Gregory and Erika P. Rodriguez. The film looks at how residents of towns near the Route define progress and the spaces that conform to it. Based on interviews conducted along the way, La Ruta questions the colony’s romantic vision of progress and comments on the island’s historical and cultural memory.

The three video channels are projected into curtains crafted out of abaca (banana) & piña fiber, alluding to the use of earth and plant fibers in traditional artisanal (craft) practices from the island and the Caribbean. The video, projected unto these curtains, traverses through the fabric, creating a phantasmagoric effect; these landscapes become intangible.

This installation also includes a hammock, which hangs in the middle of the space and which provides the viewer an active, embodied and immersive experience of the films.

The abaca and piña silk curtains were crafted in collaboration with Agnes Anna Szabo and Sally Torres Vega.

This project was part of La Ruta del Progreso, a collaborative project developed alongside Christopher Gregory-Rivera and Erika P. Rodríguez.

Exhibition History

2022 Meeting Points, Port-de-France, Martinique

2021 Reensamblaje, FotoNoviembre, Bienal de Fotografía de Tenerife, TEA Tenerife, curated by Teresa Arozena

2020 Temporal, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, curated by Dalina Perdómo

2020 Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles, CA

2019 Topologies of Excess, A Survey of Contemporary Puerto Rican Art, Harold J. Miossi Art Gallery, San Luis Obispo, CA

2018 La Ruta del Progreso, solo show, Pública, Santurce, Puerto Rico, curated by Natalia Viera Salgado

2018 Isla Imaginaria Pfizer Building, Brooklyn, NYC; curated by Natalia Viera Salgado

Collections KADIST

5-channel video installation with sound; fabric, desks, cotton material, and spools and documents found on the Cal Rosal Textile Factory in Cal Rosal, Catalonia.

Presented as part of Creença , group exhibit and residency curated by Axel Void at Konvent in Catalonia, Spain.

The quotidian rhythm of the Cal Rosal textile factory workers, their children’s education and the development of their system of beliefs was dependent on the social, economic and architectural infrastructure of the factory, which was mostly dedicated to the production of fabric sheets and tablecloths. This same industrial infrastructure is surrounded by a vast natural landscape due to its dependency to the river along the colony, which energized the factory and the convent hydraulically.

Nowadays, the space of this factory is dominated by its emptiness, by the light that illuminates this emptiness, by the silence and echo that fills the space and by the remnants of different time periods: artifacts, machinery, documents, layers of decaying paint and fabric, that are trapped in a parallel state of time. The films in this installation allude to the poetic and potential divinity of the present state of this factory. These images are interlaced with the voice of Roser, a former student of the convent and loom worker of the Cal Rosal Factory, who narrates her memories of her time at the colony.

The films are projected over materials that have been rescued from the factory: fabric, curtains, plastic and wood. These structures divide the space attempting to recreate the past dimensions of the classroom and dining room of the students and workers of the factory, who were destined to work in the textile factory once they finished their studies at the Konvent. Etern depicts a portrait of the present space of the Cal Rosal factory as a potential and continuous archive of time. Simultaneously, it seeks to create a visual and aural dialogue between the current of the river and the flow of texture of the fabric as two sources of energy of this colony.

Mehahn, a performative installation curated by musician Chris Ryan Williams and directed by Natalia Lassalle-Morillo, is a moment distilled in time that derives from thorough investigation of memories that affect us in powerful yet elusive manner. The work is a brew of stories and symbols that brings forth feelings of regret, loneliness, and hereditary love.

Performed by Juliana Alvarez, Jorge Luis Figueroa, Pricilla Chung, Symone Holmes , Nick Hon, Ben Finley & Kozue Matsumoto.

Live Theatrical Performance, 45 minutes

This live performance of Retiro embodies the spirit of the research process of making the interdisciplinary project “Retiro”. Based on interviews carried out with women over the age of 65 in Miami, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Montréal, this live performance iteration for Retiro reflects on the natural territory between autobiography and the metaphysical act of remembering. Featuring archival and behind-the-scenes footage gathered in the research process of making the film, this live performance creates a meeting place for the intersecting narratives of the women that partook in this project. It features live reenactments of the interviews performed by my collaborators, aiming to translate the documentary and filmmaking process into a theatrical form.

Commissioned by and presented at the Miami Theatre Center in Miami, Florida 2017

Performers and collaborators: Alvis Hechavarría, Mary Spring, Dale Andree, Gloria María Morillo, Rainer Davies

Article on Retiro for the Miami New Times, 2017

Director’s Note:

Retiro began as an exploration without a particular direction. When I returned to Puerto Rico in 2015 after my grandmother’s death, I began to interview my mother during her progress of grieving. She was 62 at the time, and our conversations quickly evolved into existential dialogues that involved her process of aging and her relationship to her body, her past,her future, her fears, death, time, and her relationship to nature. As I spent the next year and a half travelling for different projects, I decided to conduct similar interviews with women that were the same age or older than my mother in the cities I was working in, these being primarily Miami , San Juan and Montréal.

The video component of this project focused on documenting the participants’ aging processes but also on recreating a memory of their life through film. These ‘video portraits’ also focused on capturing the act of remembering- an act that does not dismiss the possibility of reconstructing these memories or fictionalizing them. Each woman was involved differently in the creation of these video portraits, but they had authority in the collaborative process and decided over the style, content and structure of these film portraits.

During the editing process for the video portraits, I began to question my role as an observer/listener in this project. I faced a crude reality: as much as I wanted to remain a bystander in this process and give the participants power over their narratives, I could not dismiss the fact that my own experiences, confusions, concerns and fascinations were influencing our conversations. However, I also realized that it was only thanks to my own confusing two-year journey that these women could be placed next to each other. I am the the thread between these women who lead completely different lives, thousands of miles apart.

This performance is, in many ways, an umbrella- a “theatrical coming together” of all these women and their stories in one space. It is the translation of a two year process that involves long conversations, hours of production, but also a confused listener trying to find new perspectives to her own questions about aging, time and what the concept of ‘womanhood’ signifies in our present-time.

Ultimately, this theatre performance attempts at an ecumenical understanding of our experience as people, not focusing particularly on one story, but on how all of these women and their journeys interject, intervene and converge.

Live Theatrical Performance | 30 minutes

Presented at the Miami Light Project in May 2016

IRMA is a cinematic theatre performance that addresses the cyclical nature of existence and its inevitable relationship to time. Focusing on a moment in a woman’s life that repeats itself in three different time periods, spaces and conciousnesses, IRMA explores the enduring essence of the self—the qualities, mannerisms, and unexplainable intricacies that remain throughout a person’s lifetime, while simultaneously framing the seemingly insignificant and mundane moments in everyday relationships. It addresses the collision between theatrical and cinematic time in conversation with our intimate relationship to the passing of life-time.

Featuring: Gladys Yanez, Mary Spring-Borges and Natalia Lassalle-Morillo

Film and Video by Natalia Lassalle-Morillo

Music by Nicholas Jost

IRMA was commissioned by Miami Light Project’s Here and Now Program and presented at the Light Box at Goldman Warehouse, May 19-21, 2016.

Live Theatrical Performance | 30 minutes

On Drowning is a theatrical and filmic performance series that addresses the threshold between the body’s natural will to survive and human’s inherent curiosity towards death. Each part in the series follows a story- real, imaginary or biographical- that deals with a person’s relationship to death, focusing on the intersection of technology with the natural process and cycle of life. This work was presented at Lake Studios in Berlin, Germany and Dixon Place in New York City.

Live Theatrical Performance | 35 Minutes

A Study in Cohabitation is a theatrical and filmic portrayal of a woman who restructured her life around her deceased family. This piece was created as part of the Artist-in-Residence program at Inkub8 Open Space in Miami, Florida, and at the Fonderie Darling in Montréal in 2016.