AGNES Program: Open Secret features artists Parastoo Anoushahpour (19 + 20 January), Kriss Li (9 + 10 February), Sharlene Bamboat (9 + 10 March) and Sofía Gallisá Muriente (5 + 6 April). The series of screenings and workshops take its departure from Fred Moten’s words that “poetry investigates new ways for people to get together and do stuff in the open, in secret,” and evokes cinema’s capacity to condition spaces for gathering. The double maneuver of opacity and transparency inherent in cinema’s making sets the precedent for this sort of investigation embedded in collaboration. 

Sofía Gallisá Muriente is an artist whose research-based practice resists colonial erasures and claims the freedom of historical agency, proposing mechanisms for remembering and reimagining.

SCREENINGS:

Celaje  (2020) oscillates between intimate chronicle, dream and historical document.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 an elegy to the death of the commonwealth project of Puerto Rico and the catastrophic times we survive. 

The Envoy “explores the legacy of colonialism with contemplative nuance, through lingering shots of the onetime home of Rexford Tugwell, an American economist who was appointed the governor of Puerto Rico by F.D.R., in 1941. The elegant, modernist residence is now listed on Airbnb.” (The New Yorker)