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Letter

Samantha Lance is a curator and writer originally from Sault Ste. Marie, ON, and currently based in Toronto. She holds a BFA with Distinction in Criticism and Curatorial Practice from OCAD University and will be graduating from the Master of Visual Studies in Curatorial Studies program at the University of Toronto in June 2024. Her graduating exhibition, “The Love that Remains,” is currently on view at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto from May 1 to July 27, 2024. Samantha has worked as a freelance writer and Curatorial Intern for The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery and a Curatorial Assistant and Registrar for the Art Gallery of Algoma, and she has volunteered as a Gallery Guide for the Art Gallery of Ontario. [samanthalance.format.com ](http://samanthalance.format.com)

##### Dear _C Magazine_,

When I read Alper Turan’s review of Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez’s exhibition “Survey,” I thought of the poet Jack Spicer. Like Reyes Rodriguez, Spicer was interested in transtemporal connections and communication between individuals and, more specifically, writers. For Spicer, poetry was like a radio transmission picking up signals from both the past and future, and he developed this idea further through his collection of poems titled _After Lorca_. In this 1957 book, Spicer playfully corresponds with the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, who had been long dead by the time the book was published. Interspersed among the translated poems are letters and musings that Spicer addresses to Lorca, as if he were still alive, primarily about his theories on language, poetry, and how those relate to a broader sense of community. Spicer deeply believed in poetry’s ability to create community. Rather than being a solitary activity, poetry, for Spicer, brought people together, both living and dead, creating an intergenerational tapestry of writing.

Like Spicer, Reyes Rodriguez is an artist who mines the past in order to better understand the present. He uses photography as a way to not only find commonalities between different time periods, but to also produce entirely new narratives, however fleeting they may be. The way that Turan describes the anonymity of Reyes Rodriguez’s methods of seeking connections between disparate archival photographs of queer individuals particularly resonated with me. I have always considered good art to be the product of a methodology that prioritizes poetics, concealment, and the accidental, rather than one that attempts to uncover a “truth” of some kind.

Spicer concealed himself within Lorca’s writing by slightly altering the words in Lorca’s poems. Often, these minute changes would shift the meaning of the poem entirely, echoing Douglas Crimp’s assertion that “underneath each picture is another picture.” Spicer and Reyes Rodriguez make the quest to find an origin nearly impossible. This thought is comforting to me.

##### Sincerely, <br/>
##### Paula McLean<br/>
<br/>

##### Dear _C Magazine_,

After reading Nyssa Komorowski’s featured article “The Seashells That Saved the World” on Truth and Reconciliation Day this year, I thought back to the clams I saw while I was swimming in Lake Superior on Havilland Shores Beach, in Goulais River, Ontario. I researched that these waters and their seashells are part of the traditional territory of the Ojibwe Batchewana First Nation community. Indigenous peoples once used hard clams like these to create beads for wampum belts. Komorowski writes that wampum are sacred objects for Haudenosaunee and other peoples indigenous to Turtle Island to channel their ancestors, seek guidance from the spirit world, and connect to their natural roots. From this, I think about my own lack of an almanac, specifically when it comes to knowing the names of the local plants, trees, and ecosystems that thrive in this little corner of Turtle Island. 

I seek to understand the herbalist, spiritual, and linguistic practices of the Anishinaabeg generations before my European ancestors immigrated to Canada, and eventually settled in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. This land was first named Bawating, meaning “the place of the rapids,” and has been a special gathering place for First Nations peoples of the Great Lakes for thousands of years. I think about the first agreement made between the Europeans and Indigenous peoples, signified by two parallel boats travelling on a river together in the 1613 Two Row Wampum Belt. As Komorowski writes, wampum are imbued with memories, and they also symbolize a commitment to maintaining peace, familial relationships, and the protection of the natural world. When Indigenous peoples collaborated to make wampum belts from the land and for the land, I wonder what dreams, messages, or questions they transmitted through the beads to their descendants today. 

Now, the next time I encounter these clams on the shores of Lake Superior, I will remember that each bead carved from its shell and woven into a pattern are reminders of the teachings, truths, and relationships that Indigenous peoples carry from generation to generation. Instead of adding this clam to my collection of souvenirs, I place the seashell back into the water and wait for more vessels to find their way to the shoreline. 

##### Sincerely, <br/>
##### Samantha Lance 

This issue of C Magazine looks through the mirror as a bleeding surface—a metaphor for acts of seeing, thinking, and creating that return your gaze. We recognize that the way we look in a mirror is also the way we tell a story, as a reflection of value systems and the stakes of lucidity and distortion, especially under colonial systems that would twist their subjects’ humanity. Many texts here, between artists and writers, take the form of dialogues, and think through persistent possibilities of visual revelation, language, and mourning. Formal and symbolic fractures are reflected through chimerical imagery, Hong Kong cinemas of resistance, Puerto-Rican space-time, physical and spiritual intertwining, and a real place to land for both joy and grief—the end of a rainbow, or its burning.

Mirror Mirror

Letters

Feature

Lara Mimosa Montes is a writer, editor, and teaching artist whose practice and experiences span the fields of alternative publishing and experimental writing. She was born in the Bronx.

Sofía Gallisá Muriente is a Puerto Rican visual artist and cultural organizer. Her work employs text, image, and archive as medium and subject, exploring their poetic and political implications.

> **Lara Mimosa Montes:** Your films explore the space between narrative and image, poetry and memory. For example, in _Celaje_ (2020), which I caught at The Whitney last spring, [^1] Puerto Rico appears as a collage of interwoven fragments that pairs the real alongside the written. The textures of the sea, the palm trees, and other fauna in combination with poetic language, voice-over, and the score with the coqui depicts a Puerto Rico that feels more dreamlike than documentary. When I write, I try to induce a similar state where a reader can inhabit the images in a poem by becoming attuned to the poem’s rhythms. How does writing fit into your process as someone who works with moving images outside of traditional narrative frameworks?

**Sofía Gallisá Muriente:** I’ve had cameras since I was a little girl, so images have been important for me throughout my life mainly as a way of documenting life and remembering. As I started deepening my artistic practice, I started thinking more about what the camera can’t capture, what is outside the frame, and all the images we’ve lost to time and climate, and how to make the invisible visible, conjure or account for it somehow in the combination between image, sound, and text. I also grew concerned with the automatic, mindless ways in which we consume images and how to slow that process down: interrupt, complicate, and disturb it in some way, so that whoever is watching has to make sense differently.

I film in very intuitive ways, so sometimes I need to interpret what I’ve done afterward, in the editing process. Words can be helpful to articulate those intentions, even in coded ways. Often the text or narration in my work is a collage of thoughts, references, things I overheard or that friends shared with me; and my work is to document and connect those ideas. I’m interested in layering meanings and ways of looking to explore the complexity and multiplicity of Puerto Rico. It’s a way of pushing back against the colonial gaze that insists on imaging us as just a big beautiful beach.

> **LMM:** Those techniques done in post-production generate a new atmosphere for meaning to circulate between word and image. This weekend,
I read “Interview With an Empire” (2003) [^2] —thank you for sharing it with me—and I keep returning to this idea that M. NourbeSe Philip introduces, that she handles language as if it were a “foreign anguish.”

> At the centre of Philip’s poem “Discourse on the Logic of Language” is a mirroring that happens between the words “language” and
“l/anguish.” [^3] This doubleness, a sense of being both of and outside English, tradition, the culture of the colonizer, the mainland… feels so Caribbean to me. The foreign anguish is this blank, a space of contradiction, silence, mourning; it’s a source of madness, or locura, for me. I have a hard time describing this to others because the anguish is both historical and preverbal. Do you experience a version of this—foreign anguish? Doubleness? The histories of colonialism scrambling your senses?

**SGM:** Of course! First of all I have to thank Nasrin Himada, a dear friend and curator, for sharing “Interview With an Empire” with me recently in Toronto, in
the context of Open Secret, a beautiful dialogue she generated between a group of artists mostly based in Canada and largely from immigrant backgrounds. [^4] It was interesting to read the text with them because we were all subjected to English as a colonial, imperial language, and we were sharing our ideas and works in part as a way of negotiating hybridity and experimenting with forms of visual language that can act as a counterweight. Relying on English in a context like that is very different to me, because it’s simply a mechanism of communication based on a common set of codes, but we are all standing outside the logic of that language.

I was excited that Philip is from Trinidad and Tobago and invokes the Caribbean experience in her writing. Visiting Port of Spain some years ago to do a residency with the brilliant folks from Alice Yard absolutely altered my experience of the English language. Creole English sounded and felt so different from the American English that surrounds and drowns me (culturally, professionally…). I understood it as a separate Caribbean thing, almost unrelated to the language of my colonizer.

That being said, the anguish of doubleness is definitely present for me as well. As much as I try to refuse the pressure to make myself understood in Imperial English, it’s an inevitable part of standing in the in-between, living and working in Puerto Rico while supporting myself economically and maintaining an artistic career thanks to opportunities in the United States. Negotiating that positioning in relation to communication is a constant struggle, but I am decidedly rooted in the Caribbean and in Puerto Rico; the US is not my mainland.

> **LMM:** I wonder if you could speak more to this decision, to be rooted where you are, in the Caribbean, in Puerto Rico.

**SGM:** Puerto Rico is the place where I was born and raised, where my deepest affections and allegiances are, where I feel there’s the most work to be done, where my work has the most at stake, and where it’s most personal. I had to leave New York after nine years in order to find my artistic voice because all the work I wanted to do was home. I was holding on to a clip of a newsreel for years after finding it in the National Archives in Maryland, of when the mayor of San Juan brought snow to Puerto Rico in the ’50s. It was like an apparition, because this is a mythical story but I had never seen images of the event, and it immediately complicated what I imagined it to be. I came back to PR as a fellow of Beta-Local, [^5] wanting to make something with that clip that was unlike any work I had done before. I wanted to experiment with multichannel video art and push myself to commit to art-making, and once I was here and energized by my community and the sense of infinite possibility, I was able to finally produce _Lluvia con nieve_ (2014).

As a diasporic Puerto Rican, your experience of navigating doubleness and of being rooted in a Caribbean or Puerto Rican way of thinking and writing must be very different. You said something wonderful about how Caribbean people have an innate relationship to speculation and a different relationship with time; do you sustain that within your writing practice? How do you do it while living physically disconnected from Puerto Rico or your Puerto Rican community in New York, without trafficking in nostalgia, like you mentioned you resisted?

> **LMM:** Ah, but nostalgia is so seductive! My mother recently told me that she had intended for me to be born in Puerto Rico. I couldn’t believe it— it wasn’t until we were in this community garden in Loisaida, this historically Puerto Rican neighbourhood in New York, that she thought to express to me this fantasy of self-determination. I ended up being born in New York, but I never imagined this aspect of my identity to have been the result of a very personal and ideological compromise she had made. I imagine in the ’80s, the more fluid terms some of us habitually call upon now to think about identity, relation, diaspora, and belonging may not have been so available to her. So my mother may still hold on to a speculative hope that even if I was not born in Puerto Rico, I _might_ yet be a Puerto Rican.

> Receiving this story shed light onto this speculative relation to self that haunts my writing. In my poems I repeatedly return to questions like “Who is speaking?” and “What am I? _When_ am I?” I don’t call upon nostalgia to work through these because any nostalgic feelings I may have about the island are what my mother would have tried to stoke in me. The nostalgia is not exactly my own; it is hers. She and I will likely spend the rest of our lives disentangling this. Talk about non-sovereignty!

> For now, I can recognize the moods my writing often pays tribute to are those of disorientation. Sometimes it comes out as a kind of linguistic locura, and I feel the resonance with the work of other Puerto Rican writers, especially when I read and hear the poetry. The poems of Lydia Cortés, Edwin Torres, and Urayoán Noel come to mind. The connection is reactivated whenever I hear our voices and see our work—this extends even to Bad Bunny. That the monolingual, colonial publishing and distribution networks of American literary culture don’t know how to recognize, translate, or theorize any of this is the compromise I accept to publish in the States. I also pessimistically accept the “neither here nor there” designation of the commonwealth status. Doing so allows me to identify with the sea, that which is inbetween, or at least that’s what I tell myself. How do you relate to the speculative or the non-human?

**SGM:** After the passing of Hurricane Maria in 2017, I was really drawn to thinking deeply about how climate conditions memory in the tropics, and how invisible forces like salt in the air and humidity impose impermanence all around us. For my series _Assimilate & Destroy_ (2017–2020), I started to work with film and biodeterioration, training myself to trust the process more and surrender to the elements by using expired film, burying film in wet soil and brine, or hand-developing film with native medicinal plants. As a result, the developing process made itself visible through the different artefacts that it provoked, but these effects were also new images and messages that I conjured through an act of transmission or mediation with my context. This process of thinking and making has evolved in a lot of different directions through my work these past few years, driven mainly by a desire to learn to observe nature and read my surroundings differently. Also, I need to be able to make work about colonialism, imperialism, memory, grief, and other heavy topics using fresh language and logics of time to reframe them and move away from tired discourses. We are so entrenched politically, and so many words have been instrumentalized and emptied of meaning, that I’m looking for communication strategies to think and feel through this world that’s on fire.

In Spanish, the word for “lagoon” (laguna) refers to both the coastal ecosystems as well as lacunae—absences or gaps in archives that signal to oblivion. I’ve been using this homonym as a departure point for a lot of the work I’ve been doing as part of an umbrella project I call _Lacuna Observatory (Observatorio de lagunas)_. I’ve spent a lot of time in lagoons throughout Puerto Rico, as well as working in formal and informal archives. In the process, one of the most beautiful things I’ve learned came from a conversation with a biologist in Laguna Grande in Fajardo. He was explaining to me the transformations in the lagoon driven by climate change that they’ve been monitoring, and suddenly he said “but there might be things happening that we can’t see or measure that might save it” and it blew my mind. We ended up talking about chaos theory and how to always count on what we don’t know that we don’t know. This take on the uncertain and unknown as potentially life-saving really made me trust the speculative in a new way, and be a little less pessimistic about the future.

How do you relate to the future?

> **LMM:** That’s incredible. I enjoy the different layers of materiality you work into the narrative process. The weather, the salt, and the sea make contact with the film and create this new texture, particularly in _Celaje_. I love to dwell in these zones of possibility—especially when they’re the result of a process that involves analogue technologies, natural elements, the reality of devastation. In this kind of situation, the only constant is change and you have to accept there’s only so much in your control as an artist. Maybe I relate to the fatalism in this.

> I believe this speculative way of working with matter, time, and the immaterial is also a way of making contact with the future. The synthesis of the metaphysical and the biochemical is a form of alchemy, and this is what I want to tap into when I sit down to write. Change, transformation, and destruction are not only essential but sacred parts of the creative process, so I try to make a habit of inviting chance, accident, and ruin into my practice as these feel like forms of speculative thinking. This is an intuitive thing, yet I am also self-conscious about it. As a teaching artist, I feel compelled to theorize the intuitive, but I find it to be a challenge: how does one describe to others through the language of practice what also feels innate?

**SGM:** Another part I love from the text by Philip is when she says, “The struggle is to reduce the gap between the experience and the expression of that experience.” [^6] That resonates _deeply_ with my work. It’s a struggle. Yet here we are. The struggle goes on. Everyday.

[^1]: See: “no existe unmundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria,” [https://whitney.org/exhibitions/no-existe](https://whitney.org/exhibitions/no-existe)
[^2]: M. NourbeSe Philip, “Interview with an Empire,” in _Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally_, ed. Romana Huk (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 195–206; see also: [https://www.are.na/block/1979981](https://www.are.na/block/1979981)
[^3]: M. NourbeSe Philip, “Discourse on the Logic of Language,” in _She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks_ (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2015), 29–34; see also: [https://www.womensrepublic.net/english-is-a-foreign-anguish-m-nourbese-philip](https://www.womensrepublic.net/english-is-a-foreign-anguish-m-nourbese-philip)
[^4]: Curated by Nasrin Himada, Open Secret is a series of screenings, conversations, and workshops that take place at Agnes Etherington Art Centre (Kingston, ON): [https://agnes.queensu.ca/participate/talks-tours-events/open-secret-sofia-gallisa-muriente](https://agnes.queensu.ca/participate/talks-tours-events/open-secret-sofia-gallisa-muriente)
[^5]: Beta-Local is an artist-run organization in PR dedicated to fostering knowledge exchange and artistic practices.
[^6]: Philip, “Interview with an Empire,” 197.

Writer

Speaker

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C159_MontesMuriente.pdf

Language

Time

Lara Mimosa Montes and Sofía Gallisá Muriente discuss their respective writing and filmmaking practices, which image a Puerto Rican time and poetics characterized by intuition, contradiction, and linguistic locura (madness).

In the Lacuna