[Frameworks] FRIDAY 28 APRIL: CALLIGRAPHIC LANDSCAPES: LETTERS ACROSS WIND AND WATER

[Jessica Gordon-Burroughs]

*Dear all:*



*Please see info below on this upcoming programme
<https://alchemyfilmandarts.org.uk/festival-2023-events-calligraphic-landscapes/?fbclid=IwAR3RJ07jOSAYtpC0HZ2WwazvcxkUjdUWxYK71PfHo7mJ-k4aaj_qKLqqWlo>
at
Alchemy Film & Arts (Hawick, Scotland), which I guest curated, with the
participation of Puerto Rican artists Sofía Gallisá Muriente and Emilia
Beatriz.*



*See info here on the Festival
<https://alchemyfilmandarts.org.uk/festival/> more broadly.*



*All best wishes,*

*Jessica*



*CALLIGRAPHIC LANDSCAPES: LETTERS ACROSS WIND AND WATER*

*HEART OF HAWICK*
*FRIDAY 28 APRIL*
*14:30 – 16:30* / 90′

*Content warning: **contains flashing imagery; discussion of colonialism,
death.*
------------------------------

*PROGRAMME NOTES*
by Dr Jessica Gordon-Burroughs

This programme of films, letters, readings and performance centres on the
continuities and discontinuities between Scotland and Puerto Rico, as a
conversation between the Global South and North, but also as shared
colonial spaces. The programme features a little-known correspondence
between Puerto Rican and Scottish calligraphers Lorenzo Homar and Stuart
Barrie as a springboard to consider broader dynamics and points of tension
between the two spaces. Excerpts from this correspondence, creatively and
speculatively rendered, are read by Puerto Rican artist filmmaker *Sofía
Gallisá Muriente*, whose *Assimilate and Destroy I* also opens and closes
the programme.

Wind and water, a nautical reference, points toward a sense of
vulnerability, but also toward the process of writing and corresponding
across the ocean. The concept of letters and the ‘calligraphic’ gestures
toward broad figurations of writing: writing in the natural world; writing
with the voice; writing with the body; as ways of imprinting and inflecting
time and the self upon seemingly anonymous and monolithic structures and
social configurations. In the companion zine *Grief into Action*, honey,
bees and sisterhood are paired with the healing properties of salt – which,
in *Assimilate and Destroy I*, is both absorbed by and erodes the filmic
surface.

At the programme’s centre is the video and archival work *a crossing
(1698/2003)* by Glasgow-based Puerto Rican artist *Emilia Beatriz *with *Kiera
Coward-Deyell *and *Andrés Nieves*, who will also perform the work after it
screens. In that performance, the human voice activates alternative
narratives pushing up against layered histories of colonial aspirations and
military occupation on Vieques, an island east of the Puerto Rican
mainland. Herein the mythic overlaps with Vieques’s dense historical
emplotment. Contrasting an almost despairing militarism with the resistant
politics of care, *a crossing (1698/2003) *invests bees, crabs, and the
human form with an unexpected potentiality for collective action,
rebellion, and sedition. Cape Wrath in Scotland’s North serves as a
troubling counterpoint, a parallel militarised territory, both colonised
and colonising.

*Research for this programme was supported by funding from a Carnegie
Research Incentive Grant from the Carnegie Trust. **The excerpted letters
are courtesy of the Centro de Documentación de Arte Puertorriqueño del
Museo de Historia, Antropología y Arte (Universidad de Puerto Rico Recinto
de Río Piedras). **Many thanks to Susan Homar, Araceli Ortiz-Azancot, and
Flavia Marichal. *
------------------------------

*PROGRAMME*

*ASSIMILATE AND DESTOY I*
Sofía Gallisá Muriente
2’31 – Puerto Rico – 2018



*A CROSSING (1698/2003)*
Emilia Beatriz
10’04 – Scotland, Puerto Rico – 2022

The programme will also include readings from Sofía Gallisá Muriente and a
performance of *a crossing (1698/2003)* by Emilia Beatriz.



*ARTIST BIOS*


*Sofía Gallisá Muriente* is a Puerto Rican visual artist working mainly
with video, film, photography, and text. Through multiple approaches to
documentation, her work deepens the subjectivity of historical narratives,
examining formal and informal archives, popular imaginaries and visual
culture. She earned a BFA in Film & TV Production and Latin American
Studies at New York University and has participated in experimental
pedagogical platforms led by artists, like Anhoek School and Beta-Local’s
La Práctica, substituting graduate studies with a collaborative process of
learning and unlearning. She has been a resident artist of Museo La Ene
(Argentina), Alice Yard (Trinidad & Tobago), Solar (Tenerife), and
Catapult, as well as a fellow of the Flaherty Seminar and the Smithsonian
Institute. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Art in
America, Terremoto, and Hyperallergic, and earned her grants from
TEOR/éTica and NALAC. She has exhibited in the Whitney Biennial, the Queens
Museum, the Getty’s PST: LA/LA, ifa Galerie in Berlin, MAC in Puerto Rico,
MALBA in Argentina and CCA Glasgow, among others. From 2014 to 2020 she was
Co-director of the artist-run, non-profit organization Beta-Local,
dedicated to fostering knowledge exchange and transdisciplinary practices
in Puerto Rico. She is currently also a fellow of the Puerto Rican Arts
Initiative.


*Emilia Beatriz* is an artist, organiser and beekeeper in-study. Emilia
uses film, photography, text, sound and performance to re-imagine embodied
histories of land, healing and resistance, focusing on intergenerational
and inter-species listening, grief-work, and ecological struggle as
decolonial world-building practices. Emilia’s practice is underpinned by
workshops, oral histories, community archiving, work with Collective Text,
and collaborating as Letitia Beatriz aka *~care and rage*~. She was the
eleventh recipient of the Margaret Tait Award, Scotland’s most prestigious
moving image prize for artists inspired by the pioneering Orcadian
filmmaker and poet Margaret Tait.
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