Category: film

El cuervo, la fosa, y la yegua (The Raven, The Pit, and The Mare), 2021, 16 minutes, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz.

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz brings together various forms of non-linear thinking and simultaneous temporalities that challenge traditional ways of reading with El cuervo, la yegua, y la fosa (The Raven, the Pit, and the Mare). Taking as her model a method of Sanskrit poetry that tells two stories in the same text at the same time, Santiago Muñoz explores acts of simultaneous narration to juxtapose images and sounds from seemingly disconnected universes. A madeleine is both a pastry and an idea. Language is historical and abstract. In the “historical now” there is a plastic cup and a robotic arm at the bottom of the ocean. Each day a mare visits a junkyard near an overgrown forest and tries to mate with a Corvette. A traditional Haitian proverb states: the snake can only be measured once it’s dead. Consider things you can’t see but know are real: the bottom of the Puerto Rico Trench, the Marassa Jumeaux, our attachments to past orders. 

https://mediacityfilmfestival.com/25th-anniversary/beatriz-santiago-munoz/

A related version as an installation (Cuervo and Low-Polygon Poem, 2021. Two-channel color HD video with sound, 26 minutes.) was featured in Prospect 5: Yesterday we said tomorrow.

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s video is an interrogation of place, the Caribbean specifically, as well as the medium of film itself.Projecting onto both a traditional screen and a sheer curtain, Santiago Muñoz’s video combines footage from her native Puerto Rico and a 2020 trip to Haiti to visualize links between these places and New Orleans, which is often referred to as “the northernmost Caribbean city.” The film moves swiftly between documentation, interviews, scientific and computer-generated footage, and ethereal imagery, juxtaposing the everyday with the otherworldly while pointing to the ecological and cultural similarities and divergences among these places. Translation emerges as a mode of differentiation: in Puerto Rico, flour and salt suggest bread, but in Haiti they suggest veves—religious symbols used in various Voodoo practices.

The video is at times obscured by a darkness that comes after nightfall in regions that have experienced widespread power outages, like those that followed Hurricane Maria in 2017 in Puerto Rico—familiar to those who experienced Hurricane Ida in 2021 or Hurricane Katrina in 2005 in New Orleans. Santiago Muñoz also interrogates the medium of film by the other sense central to film: hearing. What does the taste of salt sound like? Is it possible to translate from one sense to another? Is translation between languages (or places, spaces, perspectives) even truly possible, or is it always merely an approximation?

Prospect 5: Yesterday we said tomorrow