“Foreign in a Domestic Sense” originates from a phrase used by Justice Edward Douglass White in 1901 during the Dowes v. Bidwell Supreme Court case. The case would delineate the political status of the newly acquired territories by the United States, following the Spanish-American war of 1898, and how they would exist in relation to the United States. The phrase described the archipelago of Puerto Rico as at once foreign for constitutional purposes, while remaining under the sovereignty of the United States. As Sofía Gallisá Muriente and Natalia Lassalle-Morillo present in their speculative documentary Foreign in a Domestic Sense (2021), this ambiguous colonial relation to the United States continues to negatively impact the reality of Puerto Ricans.

As the viewer enters the gallery, a corridor appears, built from reflective silver and gold emergency blankets that recall materials used for spacecraft technology. The corridor leads to a vast room, where Foreign in a Domestic Sense is presented as a four-channel projected film. The scale of the projection results in an all-encompassing physical experience, forcing the viewer to direct their attention from screen to screen, actively shifting their sense of space. This feeling of spatial disorientation mirrors the film’s interwoven personal narratives of displacement in the necropolitical context of colonialism, and an ongoing climate crisis in Puerto Rico.

The film begins with footage from a NASA space launch in Florida, with two adjacent screens presenting scenes from inside a plane. Overlaid onto the image of the plane’s interior is an interview with Lizbeth, who recently moved to Florida. Lizbeth describes being forced to leave Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria. Alongside thousands of Puerto Ricans that desperately sought to leave the archipelago following the destruction left by hurricanes Maria and Irma in September 2017, Lizbeth acknowledges the impossibility of returning to the Puerto Rico they left, that Puerto Rico will never exist again. It is estimated that 250,000 people have left the archipelago as a direct result of Hurricane Maria and the storm’s aftermath.

Following these catastrophic storms, the United States provided little help, avoiding accountability via Puerto Rico’s status as an unincorporated territory. The intimate personal reflections narrated in Foreign in a Domestic Sense offer a more humanized portrayal
of the ongoing socio-political, economic, and environmental crises experienced by Puerto Ricans. As Puerto Rican author and sociologist Guillermo Rebollo Gil writes in "As It Regards the Ones We've Lost" (2016), “the world in the colony is so tiny and beautiful and heartbreaking, it fits in a dance floor.”

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 Orlando, 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 Dancing with Strangers” (2023), Gallisá Muriente and Lassalle-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 orientation 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 themselves 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 advertisements for the local beer, Medalla. The film also presents other gathering spaces, such as a supermarket with various Puerto Rican staples, and a food court with decorations recreating the colonial architecture in Old San Juan. As these approximations are presented, 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. As the climate crisis continues to impact the Caribbean, more people will become displaced and be forced to migrate. In exploring the multiple losses experienced by Puerto Rican diasporic subjects, Gallisá Muriente and Lassalle-Morillo’s visual language rejects the conventions of disaster porn, and instead presents communal gatherings and intimate moments of collective joy under impossible circumstances. The artists portray the liminal and disorienting experience of various Puerto Rican diasporic subjects creating new approximations of home, wherever home may be.