The Brooklyn Rail

For her latest exhibition at PROXYCO Gallery, Sofía Gallisá Muriente ventures into spaces where memory resides—elusive, fragmented, or obscured—to unearth “unknown unknowns,” the aspects of history we cannot yet name or imagine. During her recent residency at the General Archive of Puerto Rico, Gallisá Muriente unearthed a film reel created by the Intelligence Division of the Puerto Rico Police as part of a decades-long espionage program. The footage, shot by police officers inadequately trained to document pro-independence protests, is disjointed, unfocused, and rife with erratic pans—ultimately failing as surveillance. Gallisá Muriente appropriates this flawed material in Película policiaca // Police film (2024), where its visual failure embodies the shortcomings of the colonial gaze, unable to confine those whose movements exist within and beyond its frame, evading and surpassing its capture.

From the disorienting reel of film, Gallisá Muriente extracts nine stills—rare moments where the police focused their cameras properly. In the series “Cine Inútil // Useless Cinema” (2023–24), each image is accompanied by a yellow sheet with typewritten text authored by the artist. In these notes, Gallisá Muriente combines description and reflection, asking, “Can the person filmed ever undo the capture?” She likens the policeman’s act of filming to “pointing his camera with the finger on the trigger,” its operation echoing the mechanics of a gun. Among these isolated stills are protestors who return the camera’s gaze directly, their expressions defiant or curious within this symbolic frame of state power. Some aim their own cameras back at the surveillance lens, but these alternative records face precarious longevity. As Gallisá Muriente notes, “Militant filmmakers lose many of their films in hurricanes, fires, divorces, bankruptcies, moves, infighting, floods, and dissolution. Few images survive the political and atmospheric climate.” Meanwhile, the “freezing air conditioning at government offices backed by generators” ensures that the inefficient surveillance films survive, even as Puerto Rico’s citizens endure rolling blackouts. 

The exhibition also delves into further idiosyncrasies, contradictions, and mechanisms of power in the archive, questioning its claims of preservation and authority. In Fragmento // Fragment (2023), a gloved hand holds up a small plastic bag containing the scrap of an unidentified document riddled with insect damage, while nearby, a photograph depicts neglected stamps (labeled, among other things, “condemned,” “destroyed,” and “deaccessioned,”) covered in dust like relics of bureaucratic processes. Intended as a bastion of order and preservation, the archive instead reveals its own vulnerability to decay and mismanagement.

In the video Caricia // Caress (2024), the careful handling and petting of an unidentified shell-like object introduces a tenderness that runs counter to the rigid, impersonal procedures of traditional archival practices. This theme continues in Guaniquilla Luminosa // Luminous Guaniquilla (2023), where films captured with a Super 8 camera were developed using water from Laguna Guaniquilla, a site tied to the mythic origins of Puerto Rico. By forgoing the highly chemical and tightly controlled processes of film development, Gallisá Muriente allows the water’s minerals, algae, and other natural particles to add unexpected colors and opacity, asserting the unpredictable influence of nature and time on the archival record. In embracing these natural forces, the work renders the notion of a stable or permanent record illusory, revealing instead how all records are shaped—and reshaped—by the interplay of time, environment, and human intervention.

The video Últimas luces // Last lights (2022–24) shifts focus to the displacement of memory in the more intimate context of the home. The film centers on the artist’s grandmother’s house in Levittown, Puerto Rico—part of the postwar, planned suburban communities that epitomized the promise of the American dream: suburban comfort, stability, and upward mobility. In Puerto Rico, however, Levittown serves as a complicated mirror of this dream, exposing the colonial tensions embedded in the transplantation of such ideals to the island. The video presents the uninhabited house, stripped of personal belongings, at night, turned into a blank screen for Gallisá Muriente’s projections. As a gesture of farewell, she fills the once lived in home with light. Moving through different rooms, the artist projects flickering images of waves and palm trees that engulf entire walls—idyllic images of Puerto Rico’s beaches, now increasingly privatized by real estate development. In the final moments, the camera shifts to the house’s hollow garage, illuminated by streetlight, casting shadows over a Se Vende [For Sale] sign taped to the gate—a quiet marker of the home’s repackaging for sale amid a new climate of housing commodification and the displacement of Puerto Ricans. Even within the domestic context, Gallisá Muriente captures the duality of spaces that hold memory, whether archives or homes, portraying them as both repositories of history and architectural shells defined by gaps and absences.

Memory, as Gallisá Muriente reminds us, is never static; it shifts between clarity and obscurity, eluding attempts at capture and containment. By freezing, illuminating, or distorting these archival records, she compels us to confront the fluidity and fragility of what we rely on to understand our past. She reflects on this tension, observing, “The police gaze persists in the archive. The resistance persists outside of the frame,” inviting us to consider the generative potential of what evades capture.