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Review

Bettina Pérez Martínez (she/they) is a curator, writer, and researcher living and working in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal. Her work focuses on Caribbean identity and relationalism, Puerto Rican history and its current politics, decoloniality, diaspora, ecology, and climate change in the Caribbean region. She is a 2022–2024 Bridging the Divides Fellow, a Mellon Foundation initiative, and their work has been published in _esse_, _CENTRO Journal_, _Beyond the Gallery_, and _Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico: Disaster, Vulnerability & Resiliency_.

“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. 

Writer

In _C Magazine_’s 40th year of publication, the writing and visual projects in this issue form an almanac in themselves, out of the impulse to make meaning out of the present state of contemporary art and liberatory organizing. As contributors find grounding in celestial time, ancestors, the stakes of censorship, the choreography of movement building, AI incantations, and more, we express almanacs as projects of persistence between past, present, and future—and even of spell-casting.

In C Magazine’s 40th year of publication, the writing and visual projects in this issue form an almanac in themselves, out of the impulse to make meaning out of the present state of contemporary art and liberatory organizing. As contributors find grounding in celestial time, ancestors, the stakes of censorship, the choreography of movement building, AI incantations, and more, we express almanacs as projects of persistence between past, present, and future—and even of spell-casting.

Almanac

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“Foreign in a Domestic Sense” ran from 8 February to 30 March 2024 at Dazibao, Montreal.


“Foreign in a Domestic Sense” — Sofía Gallisá Muriente and Natalia Lassalle-Morillo

Jayne Wilkinson is a writer, editor, and curator. She was formerly Editor-in-Chief at _Canadian Art_ and regularly contributes to art publications including _C Magazine_, _e-flux Criticism_, _esse arts + opinions_, _Momus_, and others. She holds an MA in Art History and Critical Theory from the University of British Columbia and is an occasional lecturer in Visual Studies at the University of Toronto.


This is not a normal review. The ongoing genocide in Gaza makes it impossible to consider contemporary art in any regular sense. How to assess aesthetics, impact, concepts, political positions, and the histories upon which art is produced when, as of this writing, Israel is in the midst of its invasion of Rafah, trapping more than one million people in a war zone, continuing to bomb hospitals, refugee camps, basic infrastructure, and producing widespread conditions of famine? It takes a lot of conceptual dissociation to consider a Biennale exhibition titled “Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere” on its own terms when Palestinians are being dehumanized, treated as “foreign,” othered, and killed in their own homes.

As an art writer, I want to always remember that we learn from artists first, that artists are our teachers. I never want to become jaded or think of art as secondary. I want art that reminds us of shared experiences, shared humanity, art that is more powerful than capital, that is never reducible to luxury. I want art that shows us how, at its very core, making art is what it means to be human. Palestinian artists, poets, writers, and their allies show us how to encourage critique alongside solidarity, how to imagine relationships, lives, and histories through aesthetics, how to build meaningful connections despite systems designed to isolate us. What follows is a brief survey of projects in Venice that offer connection and a sense of urgency in thinking through the role of art, even alongside military occupation. 

“South West Bank – Landworks, Collective Action and Sound” is the single official collateral exhibition of the Biennale to focus on art from Palestine. It gathers 20 Palestinian and allied artists and collectives in a small space to present what the title describes: land-based, sonic, and social-activist artworks from the southern West Bank. Curated by Jonathan Turner, the exhibition includes a mix of practices from collaborators of Artists + Allies x Hebron and Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research in Bethlehem: Samer Barbari, Adam Broomberg, Duncan Campbell, Rafael González, Isabella Hammad, Shayma Hamad, Chris Harding, Baha Hilo, Emily Jacir, Sebastián Jatz Rawicz, Benjamin Lind, Jumana Manna, Michael Rakowitz, Mohammad Saleh, Vivien Sansour, Andrea de Siena, Dima Srouji, and other participants. Together their works make a powerful claim for how histories of cultivation, the tending and caring for and of the land, are practices of homemaking deeply rooted in Palestine. Adam Broomberg and Rafael González’s large-scale black-and-white photographs, _Anchor in the landscape_ (2022), sensitively show the gnarled limbs of hundred-and thousand-year-old olive trees, twisting ever outward to accommodate new growth, which become symbolic portraits of life as both precarious and grounded. Baha Hilo’s olive oil containers, _PRESERVE_ (2022–2024), are the result of the first harvest of Dar Jacir’s olive terraces, which are being repaired through companion planting and soil regeneration. Sari Khoury’s _Grapes of Wrath_ (2021) is a minimalist arrangement of wine bottles containing wine produced from grape varietals indigenous to Palestine, inspired by the long history of viticulture in the region around Bethlehem—where the domestication of wild grapes by Natufian civilizations began in the seventh to eighth millennia BCE. Among so many powerful works, Shayma Hamad’s dough-kneading installation (_Dough ball_, 2024) and publication on bread as a sustaining component of death rituals (_The Distance of Death from my Hands to my Mouth_, 2023) and Mohammad Saleh’s _Ardawa_ (2022–ongoing), video excerpts documenting the bioremediation of an urban farm burned by the Israeli army in 2021, both stand out as demonstrations of the beauty in connecting people to the land and each other.

At Fondazione In Between Art Film, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s _Until we became fire and fire us_ (2023–ongoing) is an emotionally affecting multiscreen and multimedia installation that takes the land and life of Palestine as its locus. Although part of the group exhibition “Nebula,” it functions very much as a solo presentation, spanning six rooms that increase with visual and sonic intensity as one moves through. The first rooms are quieter, with a series of monolithic steel-panel sculptures presenting images and short notes, almost desktop-like, alongside drawings of Jerusalem created by Abou-Rahme’s father in the ’70s and ’80s. In his drawings, lone figures are shown against cityscapes, and the inverted use of white on black produces a visual effect akin to photographic negatives. As focal points amid more abstract hanging textiles and floods of pink light, the drawings suggest a personal form of historical documentation and offer a moving gesture of connection between two generations of artists. The sonic components are louder and the visual projections all-encompassing in subsequent rooms, producing a non-linear narration that travels and dances and flickers, flame-like, through accounts of indigenous plants, cactuses, ancient stones, song and protest, fire and regeneration—all emblematic of the stamina and resistance of life in Palestine. The effect induces an amnesiac’s memory: something is here that can’t be held on to, as though the end and the beginning are the same. The phrase “THOSE WHO CHANT DO NOT DIE” is a singular impression among many powerful onscreen phrases, an incantation that protest is never in vain. 

Of all the projects in Venice, what stayed with me most was the open-mic poetry readings at the Freedom Boat, which was docked alongside the Giardini vaporetto stop from April 18 to 19 and organized by Artists Against Apartheid, Bidoun, Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG), and Kamel Lazaar Foundation. Visitors could listen or sign up to read from _Gaza Reader Vol. 1: Poetry_, a specially compiled chapbook that features writing by Palestinian poets, journalists, and at least three recently martyred writers. Maritime flags designed by artists Nicole Eisenman and Rosalind Nashashibi—one with the Palestine flag and the other with the keffiyeh pattern painted over the civic flags of Venice—framed the speakers. With the late afternoon light reflecting off the sea’s surface, and the readers’ voices mixing with the sounds of gulls caught in the wind overhead, the overwhelming power of words to articulate experience in all its horror and beauty, trauma and joy, pain and strength, was transformative. To be connected through poetry did not act as performance but solace. 

“Now is the time for art and poetry. For art that rejects the logic of prevailing power. For poetry that resists the totalizing narratives that fuel the killing machines of the perpetrator. Art is inherently political— in its message, production, and presentation. It engages with society, assuming a role either in complicity or resistance.” This short excerpt is from “WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF ART? A manifesto against the state of the world,” a widely distributed poster that functioned as part of a de facto Palestinian Pavilion. To keep thinking about what art does, even in the face of genocide, is to continue to follow the artists who are leading us, in art and in poetry, in words and images, through ideas that can’t be shot down, buried, ignored, bought, or owned. The last line reads: “Palestine is the world in its future tense.” There is no room for complicity in such a world. 


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“South West Bank – Landworks, Collective Action and Sound” included work from Artists + Allies x Hebron and Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research in Bethlehem: Samer Barbari, Adam Broomberg, Duncan Campbell, Rafael González, Isabella Hammad, Shayma Hamad, Chris Harding, Baha Hilo, Emily Jacir, Sebastián Jatz Rawicz, Benjamin Lind, Jumana Manna, Michael Rakowitz, Mohammad Saleh, Vivien Sansour, Andrea de Siena, Dima Srouji, and other participants. It was shown from 20 April to 24 November 2024 at the 60th Venice Biennale.


“South West Bank – Landworks, Collective Action and Sound” and Other Projects at the 60th Venice Biennale