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Images Festival is committed to providing an accessible festival and continues to work to reduce barriers to participation at our events. This year, we are implementing a COVID-19 policy to reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission for all, and to prioritize the participation of people who are disability-identified, immunocompromised, or part of an otherwise vulnerable group.
The following guidelines will be in place: Self-Assessment: We ask that staff and participants screen themselves for COVID-19 before visiting the exhibition.
In Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s feature-length film Oriana, a band of feminist militants takes refuge in a thriving Puerto Rican landscape. The film relocates Monique Wittig’s infamous novel Les Guérillères to the island in the wake of Hurricane Maria, where its protagonists work and cook, dance and rest, and prepare for battle amidst the abundant tropical vegetation.
Suffused with unexplainable encounters, Oriana unfolds across forests, caves, rivers, and the ruins of industry and colonial infrastructure abandoned and fallen into disrepair. Encompassing both delirious choreographic interludes and attention to quiet rituals, the film maps a world of perceptual distortions, obscure gestures, and collective processes, one where quotidian objects transform into arcane weapons and where ancestral spirits and the recently dead alike become phantasmatically present.
Performed by a cast of Beatriz’s collaborators who come from music, performance, art, and poetry, Oriana was filmed on location in Puerto Rico and at EMPAC, where the Centre’s theatre itself becomes a site of temporary shelter and respite from a struggle that remains at once omnipresent and unspecified. Nevertheless, against this backdrop of exhaustion and threat, the film strives to visualize the ecstatic and unsettling potential of new social forms, languages, and ways of living in the aftermath of a slow exit from long legacies of colonization and patriarchy.
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz is an artist based in San Juan, Puerto Rico whose expanded moving image practice is entangled with Boalian theater, expanded cinema, and feminist practices. She tends to work with non-actors and improvisation. Her recent focus is on the sensorial unconscious of anti-colonial movements, everyday poetic thought, and feminist experiments. Recent solo exhibitions have taken place at Pivô in São Paulo and Argos in Brussels as well as the 34th São Paulo Biennial and the Momenta Biennale in Montreal.