Latin American Film Festival: Sofía Gallisá Muriente
Thursday, September 18, 7 pm
Free or suggested donation
Squeaky Wheel is excited to host the Latin American Film Festival with artist and filmmaker Sofía Gallisá Muriente! Muriente, a visual artist from San Juan, Puerto Rico, will showcase her films that have been shown at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Museum, and the Whitney Museum. She will screen her films Celaje (2020) and Foreign in a Domestic Sense (2021). Ms. Muriente will take part in a conversation and Q&A following the screening. You can watch a profile of Ms. Muriente here. The 2025 Latin American Film Festival is organized by the University at Buffalo Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and CAS Office for Diversity, Equity, and Belonging and is a three-night celebration of Latin American cinema! Each evening will feature powerful films that highlight the Latin American diaspora through people’s lives, histories, and cultures. For more information, see the flyer here or contact Donte McFadden, CAS Unit Diversity Officer at dontemcf@buffalo.edu.
Attendees: Please note that you cannot enter Tri-Main Center after 7:30 pm. Squeaky Wheel is located in Suite 310 of Tri-Main Center. Take the elevator to the third floor, and head left. Click here to see parking, transportation, and accessibility information.
Program
Celaje (Cloudscape)
16mm and Super8 film with various treatments, 41min
Celaje (Cloudscape) oscillates between intimate chronicle, dream and historical document. Combining images in Super 8 and 16mm, hand development techniques and original music by José Iván Lebrón Moreira, the piece weaves together en elegy to the death of the colonial project and the sedimentation of disasters in Puerto Rico. Memories move around like clouds, images rot and age, and the traces of the process are visible on the film and in the country, like ghosts.
It is the third and final part of Assimilate & Destroy, a series of works that examine the relationship between climate and memory in the tropics, where nature imposes impermanence.
Foreign in a Domestic Sense
Sofía Gallisá Muriente & Natalia Lassalle Morillo
4-channel installation with sound, 32min
4k, Hi8 and HD video with hand developed Super 8 film
Foreign in a Domestic Sense is a constellation of testimonies and imaginaries of Puerto Ricans who have migrated to Central Florida in recent years. The images conjured by visual artists Natalia Lassalle-Morillo and Sofía Gallisá Muriente evoke, accompany and connect the lived experiences of people who are part of the fastest-growing Puerto Rican population in the United States, as a result of political and environmental disasters in the archipelago. Just as the continuous states of emergency unsettle space and time, the artists explore visual languages rooted in the context of Florida to deepen the fragmentation while building a choir of people, places, memories and experiences. The four channel film layers fictional and non-fictional narrative forms in video and Super 8 film, speculating about how community is created through performance and recreation. Staging a dance floor in the darkness of a swamp, the artists envision a 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.
The 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.
Biography of the artist
Sofía Gallisá Muriente (b. 1986, San Juan, Puerto Rico) is a visual artist whose practice claims the freedom of historical agency, proposing mechanisms for remembering and reimagining. Her works employ text, image and archive as medium and subject, exploring their poetics and politics. Sofía has been a fellow of the Cisneros Institute at MoMA, Smithsonian Institute, Puerto Rican Arts Initiative, US LatinX Art Forum and others. Her work has been recently exhibited in Documenta Fifteen, MoMA, the Whitney Museum, the Smithsonian Design Triennial, MoCA TAipei, Savvy Contemporary, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, and galleries such as Proxyco, El Kilómetro and Embajada. She has participated in artistic residencies with the Vieques Historical Archive (Puerto Rico), Alice Yard (Trinidad & Tobago), Headlands Center for the Arts (California), FAARA (Uruguay), and Fonderie Darling (Montreal), among others. From 2014 to 2020, she co-directed the artist-run organization Beta-Local in San Juan. She was invited to curate the exhibition In Dispersion at VisArts Maryland in 2022, featuring image-based works from Puerto Rican artists negotiating diasporic experiences throughout the world. In 2023, she published the artist book Observatorio de lagunas: notas de campo with Editorial Educación Emergente. She lives and works in Puerto Rico and is currently a United States Artist Fellow (2024) and Trellis Art Fund Milestone grantee (2025).
