Join the Smithsonian American Art Museum for our fourth annual Women Filmmakers Festival. This year, the festival is presented exclusively online. Screenings and virtual programs are available throughout March in honor of Women’s History Month. Tune in to discover the inspiring work of contemporary filmmakers.
The 2022 festival focuses on (Re)Making Space and features artists who, through their artistic choices, the conventions they overturn, and the visionary insights they bring to each frame, use their cameras and imaginations to reshape how we see the world. Through powerful and experimental artworks, they invite us to examine our relationships to and deeper understandings of chosen landscapes. These artists uncover delicate systems of coexistence and layered histories embedded in the grounds we all traverse. The 2022 featured artists are Sasha Wortzel, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, and Shirin Neshat.
Sasha Wortzel
Sasha Wortzel (b. 1983, Fort Myers, Florida) blends archives and imaginaries and uses video, film, installation, sculpture, sound, and performance to explore the how this country’s past and present are inextricably linked through resonant spaces and their hauntings. Based between Miami and New York City, Wortzel specifically attends to sites and stories systematically erased or ignored from these regions’ histories.
Virtual Film Screening with Artist Sasha Wortzel
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On Wednesday, March 9, 2022, the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) hosted a virtual screening and conversation with artist and filmmaker Sasha Wortzel about community and environmental stewardship. The program includes discussion about Wortzel’s early film "Paint It Again" (2010), as well as the in-progress documentary “River of Grass.” Inspired by Marjory Stoneman Douglas's 1947 book, “The Everglades: River of Grass,” this film ties Florida’s current vulnerability to climate change to ongoing legacies of settler colonialism and waves of displacement. All artwork clips have been removed from this event recording. Wortzel was joined by Houston Cypress (Otter Clan of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida), artist and founder of Love the Everglades Movement and consulting producer on “River of Grass”; and Saisha Grayson, time-based media curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. This program was part of SAAM’s fourth annual Virtual Women Filmmakers Festival, which was presented completely online and ran from March 1-23, 2022, in honor of Women’s History Month. In 2022, the festival focused on the theme of “(Re)Making Space,” and featured the following artists: Sasha Wortzel, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, and Shirin Neshat. Through their artistic choices, the conventions they overturn, and the visionary insights they bring to each frame, each artist uses their cameras and imaginations to reshape how we see the world. Through powerful and experimental artworks, they invite us to examine our relationships to and deeper understandings of chosen landscapes.
This program was made possible by the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative, Because of Her Story.
I see a note that I've misstated the clan, I'm sorry, Cypress, a member of the Otter Clan of the Miccosukee tribe. I also want to note another unfortunate shift, we had hoped that Dr. Tony Perry, curator of the environmental history from the Smithsonian American History Museum would be able to join but COVID scheduling shifts meant that he had to change plans. I just have some final housekeeping and then we'll watch the films. As noted in the chat we have live captioning which you can access along the bottom of your screen and you can submit questions throughout in the Q&A box and we'll gather them up later for the discussion. Our screenings are through Zoom so sometimes that means resolution can be impacted at points along the way, so if you see anything that looks funny just assume it's your platform and not the piece. And we encourage you to watch on bigger screens and put your phones away so we can actually all stay in virtual space and focus together. So thanks and enjoy. Let's play the first video.
- (Saisha Grayson) Hello. Thank you. I invite Sasha and Houston to join me on screen. And I just want to say I'm very excited to see the rest of River of Grass. Every time I see sections of it, I just want to feel the whole piece. I know that that's coming. But -- so, hi, so good to all be here in this space. And thank you for sharing. Those are both -- it's interesting, they're in some way, they're both very personal, even though one is literally this kind of interior domestic personal story, and the other expands almost endlessly, wildly into every possible interlinking system we can imagine. And one of the things that I've just really appreciated, thinking through your work Sasha and sort of getting to know more of it, is that there are these kind of two themes as I laid out in the intro, let’s say queer placemaking and this question of sort of systems and systems of oppression but also systems of care.And they don't always get foregrounded together but in your work they sort of take different percentages or might come to the fore more than the other, but the more I think and sit with it the more I see how they're there all the time. So it gives a different perspective looking back at “Paint It Again” now seeing what you're focused on. But -- so I want to have an opportunity to kind of talk about both those aspects and maybe we can do that by starting by talking about “Paint It Again,” which was grounded more in that first consideration or showed more obviously about this relationship these two women and 40 years in the house, and then sort of how that art really very sensically sort of moves through a number of projects, to a place where ecology is really foregrounded. And maybe if we can do that by starting to talk about how you came to focus on this couple and the house, and maybe even that story about the funny anecdote of the paint job as the way in.
- (Sasha Wortzel) Sure. Well first thank you so much for having me, it's such an honor to be here and pleasure, thank you Saisha and thank you Shantelle and Gloria and all the Smithsonian staff behind the scenes for making this possible and also a very special thank you to Houston Cypress, my colleague for joining the conversation and to everyone who is tuning in tonight. I know we're a little fatigued on the Zoom but also it's a pleasure that it can -- so many people from so many different places can be here tonight. So “Paint It Again,” thank you so much for starting with that film. It's very special for me and I know I have family members joining tonight, but the main participant and the voice that you hear is actually a family member of mine, Eileen, and her partner Florence, who she's speaking about was my dad's first cousin, so these are queer family members, part of the family I was born into, I have other families. And they were, I would say, kind of some of the first queer adults or elders, you know, that I met. And I got to know them growing up and it was a really -- I think really important for me to see them and -- as sort of models for queer possibilities for the future and living -- living their lives and being -- also being artists or having artistic sensibilities and not concerned necessarily with following the normative expectation of someone of that time. They also, you know, fascinated me and gave me -- told me lots of stories about queer life in New York, pre-Stonewall and post-Stonewall and gave me access to a kind of lineage that I -- I'm often searching for in my work and so I -- when I moved to New York, in my early 20s, I started taking the train out to their home in Bridgehampton they're part of a wave of lesbians who moved out there in the 60s and 70s. And spending time with them and taking out my camera and then, unfortunately, my cousin Florence passed away shortly after I started filming with them. But in a kind of beautiful organic way my visits to Eileen-- and I also started bringing friends and she was a great storyteller-- But the process of making the film became a really interesting vehicle for us, for me to get to know my cousin Florence, to get access to these stories and histories which live so much orally in bodies and not necessarily in books or archives and it was a way for us to both play and to work through our own sense of loss or grief. Eileen confided in me that she had wished she been an actor so we kind of took on a more intentional collaboration. where we would move through the house and she would tell memories and read stories she had been writing about her life with Florence, who she shared this space with for 40 years and I would direct her. And the house also itself was just a beautiful space to film because they -- Eileen had been an art director and they together with Florence had started an antique business in American folk art. So it was just a lot of fascinating objects in that house and also photos and letters and books and things that I enjoyed exploring and getting close to these people in my family.
- (Saisha Grayson) That's so interesting to think about art direction because such a form of agency over -- over space-shaping, and sort of how one gets to think about the expressivity of an aesthetic or what that red does for example in a room. And I thought that was such an interesting anecdote, because it has something to do both with control and with letting go or being in relationship that is -- in which you trust somebody else to kind of step in.And help you co-create space. Which is where this sense of sort of communal spaces also the Bridgehampton the idea that you moved together to find a community and being able to kind of create a place in the world that feels safe and has -- has resources and reinforcement. So I really thought that was an interesting choice, did that kind of come -- was that apparent as you are moving through the materials and editing or was that something you came to sort of towards the end? I know this is sort of part of a larger piece too if you want to talk about that.
- (Sasha Wortzel) Yeah, I mean, I think that a lot of other work I have -- I -- a lot of other stuff I had been working on or sort of media that I’d seen about queer life frequently was focusing on a form of queer life in the streets, or in public spaces or in clubs, which are so critical and important, and so much happening there and my work goes to some of those places, and -- but with them it was definitely I was interested in the kind of -- this cocreation of space. This sort of interior more private space, the power of queer domesticity and forming home with another person was definitely a part of that, and became just more apparent as I started to explore the house and all the materials and objects that were in there, I think another thing that interests me is this idea that places or even buildings hold memory and have borne witness to the events that have unfolded there and carried their energies and hold culture or traditions, I felt this was one of those spaces for a larger narrative about queer home-making, place-making. And also a more personal thing for me that I was trying to trace in exploring everything from these textures of the wallpaper and --
- (Saisha Grayson) Yeah.
- (Sasha Wortzel) Yeah.
- (Saisha Grayson) Yeah a really incredible texture and tactility to actually a lot of your work it's interesting because it comes through both in things you've shot and in things you edit together of found footage. So I think it's something in your eye but it's also a sense of maybe embodiment or really wanting to bring you sort of sensorily into a space with - that is resonant, as you’re saying, but has these historical layers. And that was the kind of work that I had seen you know when you talk about club life I think I first encountered your work in relationship to a project that you did with Tourmaline “Happy Birthday, Marsha!,” that’s sort of a celebration of Marsha P. Johnson, who is this incredible trans activist and icon. And really her key participation in the Stonewall Uprising is really important but you also shift the focus so that it’s her wit and sparkle and sort of creative practice that really came through. And that was this very -- yeah, it was a very glittery and upbeat presentation and the next work that I encountered which is “This Is An Address I,” which I think came out of that same body of archival research this moments, you know, both pre- and post- Stonewall but kind of that community that first came into the streets and had this level of activism and organization to self-assert. That that was coming out of archival research and you found different ways of pulling the imaginary out of that, we talk about the archives, the imaginary, a lot, and I wanted to both ask you to maybe talk about what -- what your relationship with archival research is to get to those places and then whether you want to set up a little clip of “This Is An Address ” Because we have that available if you registered for this talk you have password access, but we realize that not everybody will have seen that so it's a sort of a way to bring you into that if you want to talk about that a little bit, too.
- (Sasha Wortzel) Sure. So my relationship with archives, I think, you know, some of the questions that I'm often exploring in my work are -- you know, it definitely stems from a place of being a younger person, also again searching for elders, queer elders, ancestors, people who came before, and -- and knowing that oftentimes those stories haven't been archived or written down-valued. And thinking about, you know, what narratives do archives produce, celebrate and maintain, which ones do they, again, not archive and write down, which ones are actually systematically erased and then what new narratives can -- can we imagine or create within those kind of gaps and elisions, which very much, I think, have to name the work of Saidiya Hartman a critical fabulation as a big influence on me and also on particularly the approach taken in “Happy Birthday, Marsha!” So I'm often thinking, also, about how can the very production process and this sort of aesthetics, visual and soundscape also kind of call attention to these questions and sort of intervene in these kind of ways that these stories of resistance get erased. And then how -- how to do that, how to tell these stories without just reproducing those same violences, and that's where I think oftentimes the imaginary comes in and that the goal is not to necessarily correct something in the past that hasn't been made part of the official record but actually just to create new -- our own new records and narratives altogether.
- (Saisha Grayson) yeah, that's great. And I -- I guess I should add “This Is An Address” was the piece that I saw where when I started to think about this film program and think about placemaking and our relationship, it was -- and it brought together, you know, the kind of queer archival work you were doing and this sense of kind of pondering environment pondering real estate pondering the forces that are both personal but also hugely systemic and capitalistic that are battling over what happens to these histories as they are layered into these spaces so “This Is An Address” is looking at Sylvia Rivera who is Marsha P. Johnson’s partner in activist and organizing and the community that she's living with on the Hudson Piers and the kind of constant threat of removal and surveillance, but also even as they're making a home there being told that by not having an address with a number they can't even access the resources of a city that's A) activated by them and sort of full of cultural energy that comes from that.But also that is supposedly there to respond to these communities. So it's very important sort of for me in thinking about these, like the flow between something like “Paint It Again” and “River of Grass.” So Cal can we play that, I think it's a three-minute clip that comes from “This Is An Address I.”
- (Saisha Grayson) That sound is so remarkable. Yeah Houston is clapping, I don’t know everybody can see…
- (Houston Cypress) So powerful.
- (Saisha Grayson) Yeah it really it is, and it feels screeching, yeah.
- (Sasha Wortzel) It's a very intense part of that, the most intense part of that film, for sure.
- (Saisha Grayson) Do you want to talk about how you use sound a little bit? Because that's one example that's really powerful.
- (Sasha Wortzel) Sure. Sure. Sound is definitely another really important element always of filmmaking and storytelling. I, you know, tend to use -- do a lot of field recordings in the sites that I'm working in so even with “Paint It Again” or-- so I'll do field recordings and sometimes I'll take those sounds and I’ll work with them to abstract them to manipulate or change them or maybe to place a sound that's recorded in another moment alongside a moment where it's not actually taking place, but it was something that was happening in that location, this idea that you know, many things like just a haunting -- a haunting of the past, a haunting of the archives, kind of a world off screen that is unknown or maybe can't quite be visualized, with “Paint It Again” for instance the sound that's in there is a sound of a record player that was in their home. We were listening to an old Yiddish record and it got to the end and it was just skipping. And there is something about the repetition and rhythm that it created a sense of time stopping but time also ongoing, cyclical nature to history and unfolding and with “This Is An Address” a lot of that sound also I have to acknowledge two fantastic collaborators, Archival Feedback, a sound artist in Miami, and then Geo Wyeth, who also I worked with on “Happy Birthday, Marsha!” score helped bring in the voices but there was really an intentional idea to take some of the recordings of the demolition process, the footage you see of that building being dismantled, that's shot in the present and the archival is the interview footage. And there was a sense of really wanting to capture like this moment of things kind of breaking down, of rupture, of anger, of all kind of – all the different emotions and feelings I think that flow through that space. And that was a particular, like, heated, kind of, escalation of the sound. It's all --
- (Saisha Grayson) Yeah.
- (Sasha Wortzel) Field recordings that were done on that site today.
- (Saisha Grayson) Yeah you feel the violence of that act through the sound, I think, even as you're seeing it and the building is being ripped apart, it's sort of the sound that is the -- kind of takes you viscerally through what it means to these kind of removals, because what that building is, is less important than what that space has meant and as it's sort of being replaced by more corporate or more moneyed interests, I think is really -- for those of us who know that space in New York, what that signal means.
- (Sasha Wortzel) And I'll just say that was a – you know, that's a particularly more maybe abrasive or like loud moment and then there's also moments of quiet and silence and in particular I worked with Geo to bring in this really beautiful Synth music that adds softness and wanting to kind of use sound to also underscore some of the conceptual thinking under the piece which is that, you know, I'm interested in bearing witness to these really terrible violences and injustices. And also simultaneously attending to and sort of lifting up strategies for recuperation, reconciliation, healing, highlighting the beautiful forms of care and community-building and solidarity that Sylvia is cultivating with the folks living there, even in the face of so much violence in a system that deems some people worthy and some disposable, there's just still a world being made. So I feel like there's this idea of both the importance of world-building and what world we want to actively un -- unmake and pull apart.
- (Saisha Grayson) Well that sounds like the perfect moment, maybe, to shift, then, to sort of, you know, as I said, like so much of this with this New York archive and moment that I was aware of in your practice, so that when I heard you were working on the Everglades, where those questions are both personal and community-level and -- and planetary-level and, you know, philosophical, like I wanted to know what you were going to do with that so very much. So I would love to hear like at what point you realized that that was where your next project was going to be and your calling to it and then of course how you met Houston and how you came to collaborate and work together.
- (Sasha Wortzel) Yes. So “River of Grass,” I -- I'll start by saying I was born and raised in southwest Florida which is an area that is -- is the Everglades though it's been changed radically, many parts of it, but I think similarly to my sort of interest in how stories and histories get embedded in place, and thinking about geographies of resistance whether that be a moment in downtown life in New York around the Stonewall riots, and this kind of like community-building that was happening between Sylvia and Marsha at that time or the Community-building that Sylvia was doing on the piers in “This Is An Address” and connecting that to a present moment, similarly, kind of taking those questions south back to a place that’s really shaped me, and thinking about land as ancestor, land as my relative in the same – in the same way. And trying really actually to, I would say around in 2016, there was -- and then following that over several years there were these really intense toxic algal blooms. There’s something that’s happening actually globally but on the West Coast of Florida we -- one -- in 2016, and then again really terribly in 2018, I was home and the – the – it just devastated marine life, it killed all local businesses, it made it – it makes it hard to breathe and there’s all these health consequences and it’s very much tied to how the Everglades were drained, reclaimed and replumbed for – I believe for industry, for agriculture and for development, and how that place was really – has been really Wetland in general in the Everglades were undervalued, misunderstood, maligned as worthless when in fact the Everglades, we couldn't live in south Florida without them. That’s where we get all of our drinking water. They sustain so much life. Without them it would be a desert. So I was really trying to understand why are these events happening that are impacting me, impacting my family, communities, and then realizing oh, it's part of this larger narrative of how we change this place, of legacy of settler colonialism, ongoing, and wanting to understand like what happened to create these conditions. Not to mention that, you know, Florida is like many coastal places but particularly Florida is very vulnerable to sea level rise and climate change and the Everglades are one of the things that helps sort of counter that, helps buffer us from storms, helps mitigate sea level rise and again provides us clean drinking water. So I was kind of coming at wanting to understand how did we get there, what unfolded historically and how are these sort of urgent ecological issues that we're facing today really rooted in legacies of settler colonialism, extraction and misunderstanding of the land and particularly wetlands which I feel you can kind of draw some parallels between you know extraction and marginalization of queer and trans life as well. So moving from “This Is An Address” which also does focus more on kind of the experience of that community and displacement, but is very much highlighting how this space is alongside the water and waterways.
- (Saisha Grayson) Yeah.
- (Sasha Wortzel) And other kinds of non-human life that we coexist with, so that's sort of the short rambly version of how I got there. And in particularly the town I was born in and raised in was formed from a former Fort that was established during the Seminole Wars, a series of wars that were intentionally the United States trying to remove indigenous people and indigenous life from the state of Florida and I was really seeing the connections between that, and what's happening ecologically today. And so started investigating through an artist residency in the Everglades National Park in 2017.
- (Saisha Grayson) That's where you met Houston, right?
- (Sasha Wortzel) Yes. So before I went down to the residency, I was just, you know, doing research and figuring out like who do I want to talk to, and Houston's name kept popping up and I was reading these fabulous interviews, learning about this organization that Houston founded Love The Everglades Movement, which I'm sure we'll talk about shortly, but yeah, one of the things I did was just to reach out to Houston, and also He's a fellow artist. We're interested in also telling stories about queer life, and so I just reached out and we had a first meeting right at the very beginning of the project, and we just sort of clicked and over time. Houston's been such an amazing generous resource, connecting me, helping answer questions, and then more formally came on board as a consulting producer and is consulting on that -- on the narration in particular on the film yeah.
- (Saisha Grayson) Houston, do you want to jump in? We know now a little bit about Sasha's connection to this space and the project and this land, you also have incredible history there, will you share?
- (Houston Cypress) Sure.
Thank you. Yeah. Again I want to say “shonabish,” which is the Miccosukee word for “thank you,” it is an honor to be with you here, and I'm a part of the Miccosukee tribe of Indians of Florida which is one of the indigenous communities that are making their home in the Everglades, so having grown up in Everglades is like I benefited from the plant medicines that are still available there as I was growing up and so now that I was the capacity to be able to advocate for conserving and protecting these areas, ultimately I want the next generation of indigenous folks to be able to still benefit from the plant medicines that I benefited from. But when Sasha came to the residency, in 2017, I was really fascinated by how this very talented artist could portray the Everglades to me in such a way that it was new to me. Sasha showed me some clips they were filming at a particular day the Everglades and I was blown away. Is this the place I call home? I don't recognize it but I'm blown away by how beautiful that you portrayed it. It was a real honor when Sasha reached out to me and asked me to collaborate on this project, it's been a beautiful journey to dive into the text that Marjory has made, to have more forays and research excursions on the land and then just to kind of think about how this place is already such a queer landscape. The Everglades is already such a queer refuge, a utopia and also still a very contested piece of landscape, a contested mosaic of landscapes. So it’s been an honor to kind of think through, to contemplate and meditate on these places and also see what we can do to, I don't know, we're filling in the gaps or if we are shining a light on unspoken or unrecorded histories, however we want to frame that, but like Sasha was referring to some of the elisions, what has been left out, and what remains. And what will return again. So it's been a really beautiful journey so far and I'm happy to be on this journey with Sasha.
- (Saisha Grayson) That's so interesting to hear you speak about, both of you about, the queer aspect of the landscape. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit more about what you each see as sort of meaningful in that, as well as I think Sasha you mentioned that you felt like even in Marjory Stoneman Douglas's language from the 1940s that there was something there that you thought in and of itself had a kind of queer angle and I think everybody would love to hear more about that.
- (Sasha Wortzel) Sure. So -- so in -- so in the “Everglades: River of Grass,” the book written by Marjory Stoneman Douglas, that this film sort of takes up and sort of reimagines, one of the things that really struck me in reading this text, I mean many things, it's a really special book, but Douglas specifically refers the Everglades as they and intentionally uses this pronoun they, which for me, you know-. of course I am making these connections, but you know on the one hand it was a way for her to very explicitly say this is not just one thing, this place, it's not singular. The Everglades are a network of interdependent ecosystems, different types of wetlands from the pine rock lands, to the cypress habitat, to the sawgrass, that all work together as one holistic system. And so there’s something very – so there’s that. But also, of course, they has ties for me the Everglades to gender neutral, gender expansiveness or gender neutral pronouns, queerness, to -- to spirits, to alternate types of kinship structures, this idea of cultivating relationships with non-human life, as well, and then just also Douglas, herself, though, she never -- I don't believe ever identified as queer or said so, but there's something very queer in the decisions that she made in her life. She was married briefly, she actually wound up in Florida because she was going there to get a legal divorce. And she refused to ever marry again and then interviews I've been watching with her, she -- she very explicitly talks about, you know, people say, why didn't you ever remarry and she said why would I? Why bother? I didn't mean to be bothered with a man, my life was very full, I had more energy for my writing, my organizing, activism, my friends, dancing, swimming, there's something beautiful about that too. It's very queer to me. So both of those things have definitely been very -- yeah, to answer your question. I would love to hear what Houston has to say.
- (Houston Cypress) Yeah, most definitely I'm inspired by the opportunities for chosen family, and that's so much of what people like Betty Osceola in the film had been talking about, and reminding us that the Everglades is yearning to reestablish and reconcile with us. And so people like Betty are always reminding us, you can claim these places as your family and that this is a survival strategy that will benefit so many other peoples, because once we embrace and love and get to know and affirm these places as our friends and family, it -- it makes it that much more difficult for us to -- to damage or hurt these places. And then I think it also reminds us of the joy that's inherent in these places. And I think overall, queerness is about, for me, an alternate set of values, an alternate set of joys, pleasures, and I think that's so much of what decoloniality is about, how can we honor the values of other systems. So I think queer people have led the way so much in that and our friends in the indigenous communities continue to remind us that we can claim these places as our friends and families. I think those are some of the queer aspects and values that the Everglades continues to shine and scintillate for us. And also how are we reclaiming what used to be epithets or considered bad words, for example, I'm looking at the clip that we just looked at from Sasha's film where the person is talking about “they” as if it is an oppressive force but how are we going to reclaim and invert that and find a sense of value and joy and worth and dignity in that beautiful gender neutral pronoun that is a way of embracing our family in the Everglades. These are some of the ways I appreciate the queerness of the land. And also as an environmentalist and an activist, I'm excited to bringing queer people out there because they have such a unique view. So what is the queer ecological knowledge that we can document and celebrate across the landscape?
- (Saisha Grayson) That's such a beautiful prompt. Thank you. I mean and that makes me think of something that's swirling around, there's -- you have Marjory Stoneman Douglas as one narrator and you mentioned, Betty, can you pronounce her last name for me?
- (Houston Cypress) Osceola
- (Saisha Grayson: Osceola, who is a present-day narrator in the film you see her in the clip, we saw she is a boat captain but also an educator and an activist. She does I think you were talking about walking tours to understand the landscape, and I was thinking between all of you there's kind of a creative pedogogy, like this film was kind of a pedagogy and epistemology and a way of thinking about and moving through a landscape as a teaching tool, is and activism you do Houston. So maybe can we talk just a little bit before we open up to audience questions and this is a reminder, throw those in there, about what it means to sort of teach differently, understand differently, know differently, that this space kind of encourages and maybe needs.
- (Houston Cypress) Yeah I would like to share briefly on that. When our colleague, our friend Betty Osceola had done these direct actions across the Everglades, she refers to them as prayer walks. And these prayer walks are opportunity for not only advocacy and to achieve political goals but also for ceremony. Also for deep listening, and I think that when we talk about pedagogy and how people learn and we instruct others, in some systems, it is as if we are waiting to be given knowledge but whereas in the indigenous worldview which Betty and others cultivate and promulgate, it is not necessarily that we wait for these gifts, we have to go out and search, we have to go out and ask, we have to go out and humble ourselves and open ourselves to these places. And Betty and her ancestors and her family that have done these prayer walks have been really great exemplars of some of these techniques. Intuition, even almost a clairvoyant sort of sensibility because we're listening deeply, we’re sharing our intuitions and interpreting them. And I think these ways of knowing, these ways of being and becoming, have either been abandoned by western civilization or have been forgotten or trampled and I think that's sort of things that Sasha's work has been pointing out. I'm really happy that Betty and others in the community have been reminding us of some of these different ways. of knowing and being and becoming that are vibrant and scintillating across the landscape.
- (Sasha Wortzel) Yes and I mean I really critical part of, you know I just want to acknowledge how important Betty has been to this film, as a participant and also as -- as an elder and educator, you know, one of the first things that she said to me when we were getting to know each other, she talked about in order to heal the land you have to heal -- we have to heal ourselves, too. And that's been kind of a definitely a guiding kind of force of this work. And I've been grateful to be able to participate, to participate and at times document these -- these prayer walks. And also the many ways that Betty and others are -- these different strategies that people are using, whether that's this prayer walk and deep listening, organizing a protest rally on I-75 that runs through the Everglades to protest Burnett Oil exploration in the big cypress which is happening currently as a big threat. Whether it is people going on and removing invasives, some of those invasive snakes are there because we put them there. It's a form of kind of giving back and healing the land and it does something to us, it transforms us through doing that. I’ve been lucky to share moments of joy and celebration, so I wanted to share that, as well.
- (Saisha Grayson) Yeah, I appreciate all of that. I think, you know, there's tonality to the film that feels like listening, it feels excited to be in relationship and commons with all of these different factors that are at play in that environment. So I really appreciate how it feels so differently than maybe a kind of climate awareness documentary that's main goal is, as Houston was saying, to tell you, to sort of feed information. There's a cultivation that needs to happen within the way you edit and gather, you know, an understanding of what this constellation of relationships is and that then doing the work is part of the practice. So I think you've figured out formally how to carry that through it's just really exciting to see and so as I said I can't wait to see the whole thing. We have some great questions, so I want to -- to turn to those.
One of them is, you know, about continuing this notion of queer family and romance in the conversation. The phrase proposes that queer collecting whether objects or people or landscapes are element of nature enable us to constitute family as queer communities. Is that something that resonates with you, that comes up in different films, I think is the question there. The statement question.
- (Sasha Wortzel) Can you just repeat it one more time? About collecting --
- (Saisha Grayson) The sort of how this might relate to queer collecting of objects or people or elements in a landscape, that enables a reconstitution of community or family.
- (Sasha Wortzel) Houston, do you want to take that, by any chance?
- (Houston Cypress) Hmm, I'm not sure I understand the notion of queer collecting, but I think that -- I think that it's definitely, these landscapes are definitely not only home, they have the potential to be home for queer people, but also sites of innovations, sites of liberation, so I think that those are some important themes and initiatives that queer people have excelled at throughout the ages. I can offer that much in terms of like reflecting on that question, but I'm not too sure if I've understood the notion of queer collecting properly but thank you for asking us and help us to think through that a little bit more.
- (Sasha Wortzel) I'm not totally sure either, but I mean in terms of I do think about, you know, forming our own other types of family networks, with friends or -- or again with landscapes and that maybe it's.. --collecting I mean has a lot of connotations, historically, but there is a way in which we actively collect or cultivate and bring together people to form -- form new understandings of queerness and family.
- (Saisha Grayson) I have another one that I really like, this viewer says they really love that we brought together sort of the one that the “Paint It Again” that sort of intimate personal history and hauntings, and then the kind of haunting of a shared colonial history. And so have you thought about -- what are your thoughts about the difference between the haunting of personal memory and the haunting of these shared kind of colonial histories, how do they operate differently and maybe how do you represent them differently.
- (Sasha Wortzel) Such a good question. I mean, I think it's sometimes hard to tease out what is personal and what is collective, because the -- the personal forms the collective and again, I guess that's kind of what I'm trying -- often trying to figure out for myself in -- in these works is where those things kind of intersect and inform and shape one another. You know for “River of Grass,” in terms of the personal, I was thinking very much when I started that project, you know, about this question of like how do I make sense of the fact that this place that I'm from actually may not exist, it's actually predicted to potentially cease to exist in my lifetime and it already looks radically different. And that led me to, what is my role in this? You know, as somebody who grew up here, or grew up in Florida but maybe is no longer always there, what is solidarity look like complicity and accountability? How do we sort of – yeah, bear witness to these injustices but also finding the ways that people who are navigating precarious landscapes or colonial kind of residues in our lives. You know, how do we even in the face of those things how do we build community and care and what does that look like? And how are those struggles linked the personal to these bigger collective things and always you know I don't think we can solve one without the other. So I'm often just trying to identify and sort of make more visible oftentimes for myself like the very systems that are maybe upholding these things, so that we can kind of see them and hopefully understand what we want to -- to do away with and dismantle and -- and where are we able to, again, find joy and beauty and relationality with each other.
- (Saisha Grayson) Houston, do you want to remark on that? I know it was sort of about the making of the films, but it's also, I think, resonant with these questions sort of how you work and -- and represent different kinds of -- if you don't call them hauntings, legacies, or layers in your work.
- (Houston Cypress) Can you propose the question again, please.
- (Saisha Grayson) Sure it was about sort of the difference between personal memories that might haunt a space and shared colonial histories, which again as -- as Sasha was pointing out might be one and the same in many cases.
- (Houston Cypress) When I think about like personal memories or personal stories, in contrast to colonial sort of narratives, I think that’s so much of what my community is struggling to do is to -- to preserve and transmit our -- not only personal memories and values and knowledges, but the collective values and memories and knowledges that the entire tribe has, and in that struggle to transmit and preserve the cultural practices, we are being trampled by the inscription of settler colonial policies and institutions on the land itself. So much that we end up having to dig up and throw away the settler colonial imposition on the land itself, like for example, what I mean very literally is that when you travel the roads or when you go into the cities you have to dig, maybe 10, 12 feet or more to get to the actual soil, to get to the actual caprock, so so much has been imposed upon the land, and that is pointing to the value, importance and necessity to support indigenous communities and their history preservation, but also as well, the land itself. The land has so much to teach, so much to share, and as we degrade it or impose invasive species on the land, so much more is lost. So I think it's a beautiful struggle as we maintain a sense of joy, indigenous joys and queer joys on the land in the face of oppression, violence, and just ignorance, overall, but I think that joys remain, the plants remain, and whatever we can do as people and as queer people to enact new protocols of joy is what's going to help us create pathways forward.
- (Saisha Grayson) That's a great answer and it inspires me sort of combine three questions so that you can sort of take what you want from them and answer them. So one is a statement that you're melting my queer Floridan heart. Are there any other films, books, art collectives about the Everglades indigeneity and queerness that you would recommend, that might be something that works into this answer, another one about what you might have learned from the prayer walks, anecdotes or highlights if you participated. And then one is a very specific question of the tree islands that are seen in there and whether they hold special significance to Native Americans today. So maybe you have an anecdote from tree islands and queerness, take it away, whatever in that you sort of feel like you can bring forward.
- (Sasha Wortzel) Houston would you like to start and speak to the tree islands? I think that's a really important thing to highlight.
- (Houston Cypress) Sure. What's -- what's the aspects of the tree islands that was asked, because there's three components.
- (Saisha Grayson) The question was both whether the tree islands hold special significance to Native Americans living in the Everglades today and are these unique landscapes being highlighted in your film Sasha.
- (Houston Cypress) The tree islands themselves have been places of refuge for our ancestors when they were escaping the onslaught of the American wars against indigenous people. These tree islands kept us safe and these days they are not only refuge for the people, but refuge for the species that still remain, plant species, animal species. These tree islands are keeping so many life forms safe these days. And as they keep so many life forms safe, they're also in danger because of water mis-management, because of fires, and so we're losing acreage out there. So whatever we can do to make friends with these places, come out and visit and witness, is going to help us make progress in preserving these places for future generations. So that's your invitation to come out and visit these tree islands. Contact me at Love The Everglades Movement I would love to take you out and help you fall in love with these places.
- (Saisha Grayson) What a beautiful invitation.
- (Sasha Wortzel) And yes, the tree islands definitely are a part of the film, which you know the film is in -- in progress and taking shape and there are many things that weren't necessarily in the sample that are part of the story and yes, definitely the tree islands are in there and yeah, other things, there's so much. Actually I believe that Love The Everglades Movement, I think you have a resource list and also have a blog that does highlight a lot of other artists, collectives, organizations, literature, that highlights the Everglades so if folks are interested, I definitely recommend reading “River of Grass,” Zora Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God” is also like really special, there’s so many things, too many to name but I would recommend looking at Love The Everglades and Artists in Residence in Everglades (AIRIE), the residency I participated in, Houston on the advisory board, I believe I would check out the work of many artists going through that residency.
- (Houston Cypress) Yeah definitely look us up on Instagram and Facebook, we do have a recommended resources list available, so you'll --
- (Saisha Grayson) Nice.
- (Houston Cypress) community organizations much more for you to enjoy.
- (Saisha Grayson) I think we can drop that link in the chat too if people want to go straight from here to there. And I'm going to ask a more formal question we're coming towards the end but I'm going to try to get through a few more of these, one person is asking I think this is for Sasha what you find the most efficient vehicle or medium for the presentation of your films, and thinking of this as a chance, this is on zoom, but how do you often show your films and what are some other ways that this might be experienced.
- (Sasha Wortzel) Yeah thank you so much for that question. You know, I really like showing my films in a cinema, where we get to sit in the dark and have a collective experience together, something that I'm missing and hasn't been happening as much over the last few years. Definitely that's really important. I also think a lot about accessibility and providing captions and audio description and I'm also frequently working in a way where I'm making a film that is intended for that kind of collective cinematic experience which I think is super transformative to be in a room. and feel the energy of other people and really being immersed in the world-building of cinema, but I'm also often thinking about how to show these films or repurpose elements for the gallery space or performance spaces, bringing in installations, sculpture, sound installation, and also performance. So often I'm creating different iterations of the work, there will be a film but also an installation, a performance and that to me is also a sort of aesthetic and political strategy to -- to maybe take limited source material or some stories that have not been valued or written down and to try to create many, many iterations and proliferate our psyche with those.
- (Saisha Grayson) And Houston you make video, too, right? I think I saw a video of yours on ICA Miami [site], do you want to talk about how you like to share your work?
- (Houston Cypress) Yeah, thank you very much. I'm open to sharing the work as widely as possible, so I'm open to showing them across many screens and many places, finding new ways to share with new communities, because some of the things that I have been working on in the past year have been short pieces, very poetic very experimental, in which we even include dance and choreography, so I think that whatever we can do to get these inspirations onto the most screens as possible. The ideal is that transformative experience in the dark, the flickering on the screen and how does that move and you transform you, how does that -- how does that impact you. So I think that I'm open to sharing them as widely as possible. So feel free to check out the work that's available online, and I would refer to you that link that we drop into that chat box, too.
- (Sasha Wortzel) I would add also that the -- the parallel work or sort of interlocking work that Houston does through Love The Everglades of taking people into the Everglades, on walks, on airboat trips these very immersive experiences echo that as well to me. This experience of being together and being really immersed that's something that I feel like I've experienced so much in these other ways that you connect people to this place, the Everglades
- (Saisha Grayson) Well, with that, I will put forward the wish that maybe next year Women Filmmakers Festival will be at least partially in person and we can have some of that screen sharing experience and some of that coming together, but in place of that, this has been an incredible conversation and we're going to wrap up, but I'm so thankful that we could share space and talk about these incredible works. And that incredible work that is being done in the Everglades to change the future that we might imagine for that space. So thank you very much. I want to thank all the team effort and all the wonderful work behind the scenes that made this possible, and I want to remind everybody that we're going to do this again next Wednesday, March 16th, at 5:30 with the lovely Beatriz Santiago Muñoz whose work also engages with colonial histories in Puerto Rico and how to kind of counter or nuance an anthropological or ethnographical gaze there with a different kind of being in common. I invite you to join us and register for that. And I remind to you watch “This Is An Address I and II” in your own time because you have that link and you can do that. Okay, with that everyone have a wonderful evening, goodbye thank you again Sasha and Houston and everyone who has joined us, good night.
- (Houston Cypress) Until we meet an again have a good night.
- (Saisha Grayson) Thank you.
- (Sasha Wortzel) Thank you.
Watch the Conversation
On Wednesday, March 9, 2022, the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) hosted a virtual screening and conversation with artist and filmmaker Sasha Wortzel about community and environmental stewardship. The program includes discussion about Wortzel’s early film Paint It Again (2010), as well as the in-progress documentary River of Grass. Inspired by Marjory Stoneman Douglas's 1947 book, The Everglades: River of Grass, this film ties Florida’s current vulnerability to climate change to ongoing legacies of settler colonialism and waves of displacement. All artwork clips have been removed from this event recording.
Wortzel was joined by Houston Cypress (Otter Clan of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida), artist and founder of Love the Everglades Movement and consulting producer on River of Grass; and Saisha Grayson, time-based media curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
This program was part of SAAM’s fourth annual Virtual Women Filmmakers Festival, which was presented completely online and ran from March 1-23, 2022, in honor of Women’s History Month. In 2022, the festival focused on the theme of “(Re)Making Space,” and featured the following artists: Sasha Wortzel, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, and Shirin Neshat. Through their artistic choices, the conventions they overturn, and the visionary insights they bring to each frame, each artist uses their cameras and imaginations to reshape how we see the world. Through powerful and experimental artworks, they invite us to examine our relationships to and deeper understandings of chosen landscapes.
This program was made possible by the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative, Because of Her Story.
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz (b. 1972, San Juan, Puerto Rico) is an award-winning film, video, and installation artist. She is also an activist, organizer, and co-founder of Beta-Local, an art platform and experimental education program in San Juan. Her powerful, unabashedly feminist and anticolonial art counters the ethnographic, othering gaze with an ethical, embedded, collaborative engagement, insisting that all are interconnected and implicated within her chosen subjects and spaces.
Virtual Screening with Artist Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
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On Wednesday, March 16, 2022, the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) hosted artist and filmmaker Beatriz Santiago Muñoz for a virtual film screening and conversation about her work that explores the picturesque landscapes, fraught histories, and complex demographics of Puerto Rico. In "Otros Usos (Other Uses)" (2014), Santiago Muñoz captures, through the view of a refracting prism, the deceptively beautiful island of Vieques, which the US military used as a weapons testing site for six decades. Through this creative play with light, reflection, and distance, the artist imagines other uses for this terrain after the military’s pressured exit from the island in 2003. In "Gosila" (2018), the artist explores the disordered aftermath of hurricane Maria. By presenting an intimate exploration of often-stereotyped spaces, Santiago Muñoz’s reflections on her home fracture expectations and illuminate her subjects in new ways. All artwork clips have been removed from this event recording.
Santiago Muñoz is joined in conversation by Taína Caragol, curator of painting and sculpture and Latino art and history at the National Portrait Gallery, and Saisha Grayson, curator of time-based media at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
This program was part of SAAM’s fourth annual Virtual Women Filmmakers Festival, which was presented completely online and ran from March 1-23, 2022, in honor of Women’s History Month. In 2022, the festival focused on the theme of “(Re)Making Space,” and featured the following artists: Sasha Wortzel, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, and Shirin Neshat. Through their artistic choices, the conventions they overturn, and the visionary insights they bring to each frame, each artist uses their cameras and imaginations to reshape how we see the world. Through powerful and experimental artworks, they invite us to examine our relationships to and deeper understandings of chosen landscapes.
This program was made possible by the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative, Because of Her Story, and was co-presented with the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.
That short film will be followed by “Gosila,” a 2018 film made not about Hurricane Maria but amidst the aftermath, showing what life was like after this global warming super-charged storm reshaped the land and pathways through it, but also revealing really what comes before that histories of disinvestment and disinterest that are implicit in the failing infrastructure and slower, or absent institutional responses. So we’ll have lots to chew on from those. But final housekeeping before we play those - as noted in the chat we have live captioning, so you can access that along the bottom of the picture during the Zoom. And during YouTube… but in the live Zoom you can also submit questions using the Q & A box so feel free to put those in as you think of them. You don't need to wait for the end but we’ll turn to those later in the discussion. And because we are screening through Zoom, sometimes connectivity can impact resolution or playback speeds -- if you notice any distortion or lags just assume that's the platform and not the piece. With that, we'll start the screening and I'll have my guests come and join us for conversation. Thanks.
- (Saisha Grayson) Thanks. Let's take another moment, Taína and Beatriz, if you want to join me on screen, turning on your cameras… Thank you, Beatriz again for sharing those films with us and letting us share them with our audiences and for joining us. And you too, Taína. I feel like every time I see your work, it actually makes me want to take a pause before I even speak. There’s that's sort of,… one of my invitation for that deep breath was really inspired by your work, this sense that there's a moment necessary to just sort of let a different kind of time sensibility come in and be part of the body. And that's so different than -- than the way we're used to kind of film and media working on us. You know, the expectation when you open your screen or you turn on the TV is that something is going to kind of bombard you and so that's something I -- I hope we can get into as a strategy and it's related to kind of the first question I wanted to put out there, which is, you know, in previous interviews you've talked about there being kind of ---
three visual or filmic stereotypes or works that film does in and around visualizing Puerto Rico and that you can sort of typologize those: there is economically motivated, kind of, tourist views; there is military and disaster propaganda; and then there is, kind of, ethnographically-oriented, othering gaze. And here you have this practice that are, kind of, slices through all of those and does something so drastically different. I almost want to go back to the moment where you realize, that there could be another way. When did you zoom in on film as the space you wanted to make that intervention and then how did you think about what a practice could be or approach that could shift that, or work differently in the spaces that matter to you.
- (Beatriz Santiago Muñoz) Well, first things thanks for the invitation and the really generous introduction and to the work and your reading of it. I think that rather than realize that there was a different way or somehow being able to see it, it was more of a, you know, going through first a kind of recognition of the way that those visual languages were ordering me and my own ability to see things --- so I think that -- and then the necessity to respond to that, not just with a critique like “this is the way that surveillance imagery works” or “this is the way that, kind of, a reconnaissance of a territory works,” or “this is, you know, it comes from the tradition of landscape, you know, and describing a property” --- yeah you're frustrated it's like frustration Tarabut rather, like, okay, so that must be just ONE way of looking. I -- that's the one that I am organized by, as most of us are, and it must be, sort of, standing in the way of being able to see and imagine other things. And so -- and then I use a lot of processes that -- that are maybe like using Chance Operations or paying attention to what other people, other bodies in space, you know, how they are using landscape, how people are moving or out of necessity or out of ingenuity, ingeniousness?
- (Saisha Grayson) Could be both.
- (Beatriz Santiago Muñoz) You know, inventiveness, you know, and trying to think in the same ways and putting obstacles in front of, you know, those ways that I have been taught to see by -- by cinema --- and trying to generate other images that I hope will surprise me. I don't -- I don't work so much with an image already in my mind, but rather I try to engage with processes that I hope will create other kinds of images.
- (Saisha Grayson) Yeah, it's interesting, I realize in setting up “Gosila” I didn't fully mention but I think you see that in the prism disruption in “Otros Usos” but also when you screen “Gosila” in a gallery setting, it's through a kind of broken piece of glass. Is that still your preferred installation?
- (Beatriz Santiago Muñoz) Right. Through the same piece of glasses that my daughter appears in the film looking through it, which is a piece of Fresnel Lens from a lighthouse lens that had already been breaking for a long time but, you know, its pieces were strung around Maunabo when after the hurricane.
- (Saisha Grayson) That is interesting. That sort of distills this idea of,… there is both this sort of the ongoing infrastructure failures that they're not attended to, and then the way the hurricane seems to be the cause of everything, but in fact, it's sort of manifesting things that are already happening.
- (Beatriz Santiago Muñoz) Yes, there's many times where you would see something and you will be like “Hurricane”?” or “Before the hurricane?”
- (Saisha Grayson) Right. Yeah, and that kind of ability to see different is also alongside this ability to, kind of, mark time differently or experiencing time differently, and when we start to, kind of coming together as a trio that was something Taína that you were, kind of, immediately drawn to, the sense of time in Beatriz's work and I wanted to give you, you know, an invitation to, kind of, talk about that and what drew you to, what you saw and, you know, if there are questions you have for Beatriz about how that functions for her.
- (Taína Caragol) Absolutely. First of all, it's lovely to be here tonight with both of you. Thank you so much for the invitation. Yeah dude that's like my whole life I understand completely around like I'm not Legos I'm not sensitive fuck you all I'm just frustrated and eightAnd indeed, I'm fascinated by the temporality, sense of temporality in your work Beatriz, and it seems to be a very important strategy in your -- as you were saying just now, your witness and characterization of envisioning a place, in particular Puerto Rico, in -- in “Gosila,” in “Otros Usos,” in “La Cueva Negra,” for which viewers must have received a link, there are many evocations of the passing of time as we see it in Puerto Rico and in the Caribbean --- and very often it is marked by different aspects of nature. And you know, in “Gosila” I think the horses copulating are a wonderful metaphor of that, it is like –-- you know, it is like an act of nature, it is a function of nature, and life goes on, right, after the hurricane. The leaves that start to grow in the -- in the trees after Maria, the paths being cleared, the sounds of the night, the evening the coquí, these little frogs we have, you know “Otros Usos,” the motion of the water, the very act of fishing, which is so much about waiting. So it would be wonderful if you could speak about how you approach temporality and why is that kind of rhythm important to you?
- (Beatriz Santiago Muñoz) Yeah, I -- I think that maybe you described it well already. I think that I'm trying to pay attention just recognizing that my own sense of time is subjective, that I am ordered as well in that sense, and so one -- one good way that I have to get out of my own sense of time is to pay attention to processes that are outside of me. And so, for example, I didn't go looking for horses copulating but I was just --- happening to be shooting the landscape and -- and they stood in front of me, you know, perfectly framed. So you know, it's also, you know, a lot of it is responding, you know, recognizing an event and paying attention to it because it is asking to be recognized in some way. That's the moment of encounter where maybe, you know, some -- some interesting things can happen and -- and my attention and their inattention to me is so evident that it becomes -- that becomes the idea on camera, you know--- it becomes that, both their -- both my or our looking at their copulating and also their complete inattention to our look and that was something that I was -- that it sort of repeated in other moments of -- of the film, even though, you know, the film is made up of these, as I had mentioned before, bits and pieces that I had not thought of putting together but that had come from a desire to damn that's cool-- to document without documenting the -- through a catastrophic image --- you know? Because -- because the image of catastrophe is an image that is used just prior to creating an argument for wiping a slate clean, displacing people, even, you know, in Puerto Rico's history this way of looking and creating images has been used as a moment before this expropriation of huge tracts of land. So that's something that I was interested in. There's no way to undo it, but rather to -- to go around, how can you recognize this moment? But without falling into the trap of reproducing an image of catastrophe that is an invitation to -- to see ourselves only as destroyed, only as, you know, a people in need of saving or -- yeah. I went from time to someplace else.
- (Saisha Grayson) No, it's interesting because I'm thinking through a couple of things that are sort of implicit in that and in the way you used the strategy of going around and to the side because there's both -- you know, there's how the image of catastrophe opens possibility of wiping clean and control which is something Taína, kind of, is also talking about. She's doing this research project on 1898 and how imaging the colonial was so important and, you know, I hope that you'll talk more about kind of how you're seeing this in that context. But then there is also the way in which imaging it as beauty, as just sheer beauty also is insufficient or is distracting or, maybe, undercuts the sense that to see is to know completely, and that -- and how much that operates in the images of the Vieques, where you know as you said before, there's no way to see the toxic residue or the cancer rates, that's not something that the camera can show us -- and so how do you get around that?
- (Beatriz Santiago Muñoz) Right. Yeah.
- (Saisha Grayson) So you talked about the prisms as a strategy for that, you know, if you want, I don't know how you, kind of, pick which strategy for which site might be really interesting to think about.
- (Beatriz Santiago Muñoz) Yeah, I was -- I was -- I had been interested first in looking at that site, largest US Navy base outside of the contiguous US, so huge piece of land that the United States had used as a -- as a Navy Base and the place from which bombing planes took off and bombed in the Vieques Sound and Vieques themselves practiced bombing for 60 years, which practice bombs are real bombs. And so I was interested in, you know, the -- this -- this base closed in 2003, and it had been more than 10 years since it had closed when I was filming and so I was trying -- very frustrated, you know, looking through my camera, looking at the ways in which the, kind of, monumental scale footprint reproduced itself through, kind of, rational use of the lens. I was trying many different things, I produced three or four films and actually a soundpiece in the process of these experiments, and this was, you know, I would -- I would spend a long time there just like looking at the ways people were breaking into the space, you know, cutting the chain link fence and going inside and using it in many different ways. One of them was as a place to fish from the shore. And it was through the observation of people fishing that I understood that there was a way to transform the scale and that it was through small formal interventions. So in my case, I made these objects, these mirrored objects that I could hold in my hand in front of the camera lens, I was shooting 16[mm], so I didn't know exactly how it was going to come out, there's more -- there's -- I think you can even tell, like, sort of nervousness of the hand, you know, playing with it in relationship to the place. And it was a really a formal experiment to turn this image that through the cameras has so often been used, you know, as a -- a – “this is my land,” you know? As a way to demarcate a territory that is owned, as a way to describe the territory. So I wanted to transform it into something that could be held, that could be thought about in terms of a human scale. So you know, it's a -- it's a visual experiment to produce a different kind of image. The sound that you hear, I know somebody mentioned, is it silent? It's really low, but it is the natural echo that the warehouses on the shore create as they mirror the sound that is produced on the coast. So you can hear the conversations of people in the dock from very far away, you know. And so it's a -- it's a, kind of, formal response to the shape of -- that the shore takes.
- (Taína Caragol) I think I have a question that is related to that, perhaps -- perhaps the answer has already been given, I don't know yet, but maybe there's more to elaborate on, Beatriz? And indeed it's the role of narrative in your films. I think we were just speaking about how you want to use the camera in a different way than -- to reproduce systems of seeing that are already in place, that are colonizing, that are oppressive --- in some kind of way. But there's also something very interesting to the -- to the structure of the narrative in your work, which is non-linear very often, and where temporalities overlap, and that is the case in “La Cueva Negra” and perhaps you can speak a little bit about that. I -- you know, in a moment where so many people are describing themselves as storytellers, I notice this very much a trend in art and in filmmaking to talk about yourself as a storyteller, I feel your work does something quite different than traditional storytelling.
- (Beatriz Santiago Muñoz) Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean sometimes you can read narrative into anything, so I guess it depends how one -- how wide or narrow one defines it. But I guess I don't -- you know, I think that there's a kind of -- there's a -- a danger to -- to structuring things in terms of story, they require us to think through individuals, they require certain kind of identification with interiority, character development, da da da da.And there's many things that cannot be described in this way, and are maybe flattened by it. I'm also, I guess if I was going to pick like a literary form that I'm more interested in, it would be like Olympian literary experiments or poetic forms, because I think, in a way, at least for me, I feel like there is a work that I need to do first that is about moving things around and trying different ways of sense-making that comes before coming out, you know, like creating a whole new way of seeing. So I'm more interested in this process of sort of breaking things apart, like how about like this, how about like this, how about like that. And -- and -- and sometimes that means, you know, of course failed -- failing at some experiments, you know? But whereas -- whereas story requires -- it doesn't require -- I guess could you think about it differently, but seems to require, to me, a more traditional structure. I've been working on a really different film for the past few years, that is a kind of this very, very loosely based on Monique Wittig’s “Les Guérillères,” which is an experimental narrative novel. And so it's a novel, you could say that it tells a story, but not really. It has no protagonist, it's really about language, she's doing something else completely, so I'm kind of interested in those -- in those experiments, yeah.
- (Saisha Grayson) Something you said just struck me and it's, you know, like the way you do, you make me think entirely differently about something I think I've thought about awhile, but you know what the category of experimental documentary implies is that a real documentary or normal documentary imposes a narrative that is completely not documentary and that we've gotten so used to that kind of controlling of the narrative that when we actually are in a space where somebody just sits with what's happening --- like just creates space for the space to unveil itself, for the people to behave in ways that surprise and that then aren't sort of re-cast and reshaped to make us comfortable with them or to understand them as protagonists in an arc, that that's what we've naturalized and how much that kind of points to –-- at what you've been talking about the sort of colonialization of our imagination to the degree we don't realize when that's happening and how it's operating and then what it does and makes it unthinkable. So when… you kind of play with the term “ethnographer”-- what that legacy of film means alongside an experimental one that's more in the poetics and I think what you were just saying really got me to think about how interesting it is that you -- that those are the words that we use to talk about what you do instead of documentary.
- (Beatriz Santiago Muñoz) Mm-hmm. I should say that there's actually a really interesting essay written by a documentarian Brett Story, also there’s been a lot of work done by experimental documentary makers over the past few years on this, kind of, insistence on storytelling and what it does, what it might leave out, and what kind of assumptions it makes about, you know, identification, like if that's the only way that we can approach something, sort of saying this person is like me, they're human just like me.
Then what does that mean?
- (Saisha Grayson) Yeah.
- (Beatriz Santiago Muñoz) Maybe there's ways of being or thinking that are completely, you know, different and that you cannot identify with and that doesn't -- that doesn't -- that shouldn't be a requirement for understanding different forms of life and thinking, yeah.
- (Saisha Grayson) Yeah. Taína, do you want to jump in?
- (Taína Caragol) Yeah, well I have a lingering biographical question, Beatriz, that really ties in, also into -- well, for partly into my research for this exhibition that Saisha mentioned that I am co-curating with Kate Lemay, 1898: U.S. Imperial Visions and Revisions with curatorial assistant Carolina Maestre, and this is a show that will happen next year at the National Portrait Gallery in April about the culmination of U.S. expansionism in 1898 through the Spanish-American War, the Annexation of Hawaii and a year later the Philippine-American War. And two things that have been -- well, really, really fascinating to me, that I was already familiar with, but I've been able to dive deeper, of course, are the diasporas generated by 1898 the migrations and the sort of positionality that provides us as migrant beings from both places in a way. And of course, as we've been talking about the systems of visualizing the colonized and the other. And I know you were trained here in the US, in Chicago, I -- am just going back to that first question that Saisha asked you about, how did you come to make work that really tries to dismantle that, you know, that colonial gaze and that ethnographic gaze in relation to Puerto Rico, you know, how did the experience of, you think -- how do you think the experience of being trained on this side in the US informed that? And informs your -- your positionality as a filmmaker.
- (Beatriz Santiago Muñoz) Yeah, well that's interesting, when I think about it, I think -- I mean, I don't think that it's the -- it's the US training at the School of the Art Institute or University of Chicago that created the archive. I think it's like --- it's the archive that we have from the moment we start looking at images, photography, it's -- you know, it's one that comes from all kinds of image-making and circulation that I would have experienced, you know, in Puerto Rico, as well, that I --- experienced in Puerto Rico, and then, it was actually in graduate school that I had--- because I had some fabulous teachers who introduced me to the works of Sara Gómez in Cuba, who introduced me to Octavio Getino and Solanas’ work, and I saw experimental Latin American film when I left Puerto Rico. So it was -- that was actually maybe an introduction to ways of thinking that I had not had the opportunity to think about, and -- and then -- and then when I -- when I went back home to Puerto Rico I had this really more sensorial experience of understanding that certain things about modes of production and ways of making work simply did not apply, that applied in Chicago did not apply in Puerto Rico --- and that I needed to craft different ways of working that in a way were much more artisanal, that paid attention to things that happened around me there in Puerto Rico that did not happen, you know, in Chicago. I just, you know, I started making like when I -- when I went back home I started making a lot of work that used techniques, theater techniques from Augusto Boal a lot of structured improvisation and this is something that didn't come out of nowhere, that came more from looking at the work that Puerto Rican theater makers, who had --- who were doing a lot of street theater and, you know, what were their references and finding their kind of community of thinking that maybe could apply better to what I was -- what I was trying to do.
And so I kind of put those two things together, you know, getting that film education that I was able to -- to have access to in graduate school and then putting that together with other ways of thinking, making art and theater in Puerto Rico that I didn't get in -- through my education, yeah.
- (Saisha Grayson) That's interesting. I guess I tie that, then, I'm curious once you're in San Juan and you are working on Beta-Local and you also worked on these Walking Seminars, and were that --- was that maybe also in relationship to this kind of idea of improvisation and -- and kind of an ebb and flow and how does that, kind of, seminar in the space and with other people go on to influence how you make films subsequently.
- (Beatriz Santiago Muñoz) Yeah, that came from really thinking about, like, you know, once you start questioning some things you start questioning a lot of other things, as well. So like, wait, what am I doing teaching, you know, film, sitting in a room with -- we're not moving from the chair, all we're doing is speaking, but I'm talking about how one needs to respond with sensorial attention -- that doesn't make sense --- Like, what kind of form can we come up with that would generate that sensorial attention without having to describe it, you know. How can we all see it? That was a way of generating, ok, maybe the class needs to be moving on foot. And the first thing we would do, the first seminar was, first we go to point A then we go to point B, and we were moving in a car from point to point. And then after that first seminar we realized, oh, we -- we can't just go to point A and point B we know how those two points are organized and what they are. This is a base and this is, you know, for example, so we need to walk from a place to place and sort of that will generate the kind of sensorial attention to place, a place that has no name, that has no order that we can recognize. So you know it was a project that kind of transformed collectively through -- through making and -- and, yeah.
- (Saisha Grayson) Yeah and that seems like something that you then do do in your films, which is sort of let the subject and space transform what it is you think you might do there or what it might mean when it reaches the film.
- (Beatriz Santiago Muñoz) Right. Yeah. I mean I usually start with a kind of, you know, I called it like a structure in my pocket, you know, that I just offer, you know, like here's a structure, like, let's play with this --- because it's a kind of excuse, you know, to start from --
- (Saisha Grayson) To start from somewhere? Yeah, people get very intimidated if you don't offer someplace to start. I think that's very true.
- (Beatriz Santiago Muñoz) Yeah, and I learned also pretty quickly that if you don't -- if you don't start from a place that changes things upside down to begin with then we tend to sit down and just talk or, you know, like then we tend to repeat the forms that we know, but so if you start, even if it's insane and it doesn't work, if you start with a thing that, you know, that shakes things, then okay, we tried that, that didn't work, but there's a thousand other things that you could try, yeah.
- (Saisha Grayson) Okay, well that's a great segue to one of our audience questions, so we're going to start to bring in some audience questions and we've got a couple but feel free to put some more in, we've got a couple more minutes.And one guest asks, you know, that there's a challenge to sometimes understanding maybe what you're trying to express, which is something I know you’ve talked about, is where expression falls in your practice, but are there other kinds of approaches you might take for -- for your work or different scenes, you know, in kind of, I don’t know, if there's messages to convey or something you do want to get across, if that's not always happening.
- (Beatriz Santiago Muñoz) Yeah, I guess – hmm, hmm, I mean, I have -- I do normally think of this not as something -- not as expression, not as individual expression, but as experiments, you know, that -- that are produced through an encounter, and sometimes there isn't anything really to understand about expression beyond that, it's just sort of to engage with an image or --. But I guess I understand the question in the sense that, I would say, yes, I tried many different things. And -- and -- and I understand that failure is part of the process of trying many different things, yeah.
- (Saisha Grayson) Yeah. So another question is about considering how the impacts of the US military seem unreal to those who do not experience it directly, as it is both kept secret and at a physical distance and that's something that we were talking about as well. Can you speak to lens-based practices perhaps contributing in visualizing this. In this case, I am not sure if it is visualizing the absence or when you visualize something that you don’t see, do you kind of add to the sense that it's unreal or not there, and how do you see your work engaged in perhaps hyperreality via video.
- (Beatriz Santiago Muñoz) I'm not sure I know what hyper reality is.
- (Saisha Grayson) I'm not sure either in this context.
- (Beatriz Santiago Muñoz) Well, I think that, I think of my practice as contributing to creating languages, visual languages that -- that can respond to or be analogous or be recognizable as the -- you know, as that experience. And so, you know, for example, in the film that is made up of pieces, you know, of the months after the hurricane, you -- those are images that may be hard to recognize for somebody that did not go through that process. But for almost, you know, for anybody that was in Puerto Rico or -- or has gone through a moment like that, it's why would they be chopping those trees with, you know, by hand, with a machete, you know, what it --- how did --- you know --- you're sort of -- you kind of understand the moment and the pace of the moment.
And so that's -- I think that --- that, for me, it is not just important to have a visual language that describes to others, but that describes to ourselves and is recognizable to ourselves, as well. And that's the language, there's so much media that is made about Puerto Rico that we're not the -- it's not for us, you know? It's not -- it is -- it re-presents our experience as others to others, but what I think you know film can really do is allow us to think in different ways, and so I'm interested in that and in making – and in engaging with that, that problem, yeah.
- (Saisha Grayson) Yeah. That's so interesting. Taína, do you want to add to that it? It felt like you were really feeling that.
- (Taína Caragol) It represents our experience as others to others… say no more. That's like, wow.
- (Saisha Grayson) There's a question in the Q & A that has a long introduction and it's about an exhibition at De Paul university, but I'm going to go to the question and then other people I think can read the intro, because it relates to what you were just saying, but that it was sort of presented with minimal captioning and seen as an opportunity to experience the messages with the piece and issues and the concerns through the artists’ eyes. Do you think seeing through the artists’ eyes is your point or seeing through the subjects, the other eyes in dissimilar spaces such as campuses, corporate or council commissions to which our people come from and that place -- and then places that have no name or official address, to marketsplace like Bodegas, or mom's kitchen with the smell of food, I think [inaudible], I don’t know what that is, I think that is a way of saying, some of this question, sort of, who is it for, and who -- who is expressing, and who is being subject, but I think there's something in there that's even more pointed about what you were talking about.
- (Beatriz Santiago Muñoz) Yeah, I mean I guess there's -- I'm really interested in there's a moment I started thinking if you were going to tell a history of photography in the Caribbean, how would one tell it? Like you have to think about it from the point of view of the subject. You would you have to tell a history of photography from the subject's point of view as a person, as a person making meaning through the pose, through ---
saying no, you know, go with your camera someplace else. All of those are -- are part of the history of photography. I'm definitely interested in that, in the subject. I don't know that I can occupy the subject's point of view, but rather I'm interested in -- in that possibility of encounter, sort of like you know what happens, you know, when you -- when you see, you know, the offer of the camera, which is I think of it as taking your eyes out, really big, and going “here are my eyes,” you know?
What do we do with this? Like where do you -- how do you want to direct my eyes? What does it mean for me to look with you, next to you? What kinds of things can I see that I couldn't see otherwise? Yeah.
- (Saisha Grayson) Yeah, and I'm sorry, I realize I missed a key part of the question so this is an exhibition about The Young Lords which is an important activist group in New York, and then I think that question felt like it was about the artist's take on them rather than the subject so that's important. And also in there was the question of how your work is exhibited or does it make the rounds at universities and colleges, which I think ---.
it does, do you -- do you prioritize that or do you find that a good space for -- for having these kind of conversations alongside and with the work?
- (Beatriz Santiago Muñoz) Yeah, I guess, you know, I don't know, my work circulates mostly in spaces like museum institutions, gallery spaces, I have a -- I mean of course there's always like a community of -- of artists and filmmakers that show the work in universities and things like that, which is like we show each other's work.
- (Saisha Grayson) Yeah.
- (Beatriz Santiago Muñoz) And -- and I think where it's -- it's harder is -- I don't know about harder. I mean, I guess for me that -- that circulation, you know, in museum spaces is the -- the institutional, you know, moment in which you have to sort of deal with ways of looking that are in particular, you know, that come from particular histories of display and exhibition.
- (Saisha Grayson) Yeah.
- (Beatriz Santiago Muñoz) Yeah.
- (Saisha Grayson) Yeah, I was thinking, you recently had a solo show at the Broad Museum at ---, is that Michigan University? So that's also an interesting space very often, these very beautifully polished architectural gallery spaces that do you have a community for thinking around it. It seems like that would be a good fit. I wanted to ask Taína, do you have other questions that you wanted to bring to the fore?
- (Taína Caragol) Well, only a comment that -- that thinking about your work in institutional spaces, that are not exactly contemporary art spaces but more, let's say historical museums, you know, or museums where -- where art and history intersect, it must -- I would imagine it was really provide a very striking contrast.
- (Beatriz Santiago Muñoz) Mm-hmm.
- (Taína Caragol) To -- well, to the ways of seeing that are embodied in the collections and in the exhibitions.
- (Beatriz Santiago Muñoz: Mm-hmm.
- (Saisha Grayson) Yeah, I've been thinking about that too just at SAAM we have this landscape collection and so to think about your work in relation to both the histories of photography and surveillance but painted landscape, that also has its own legacies of domination and erasure, so it is really --- it is exciting for me to think alongside you of other ways of seeing that -- that when you walk into a space and not kind of have to organize it in that way.
- (Beatriz Santiago Muñoz) Yeah. Yeah.
- (Saisha Grayson) Anyway, so I think we're perfectly at time for this wonderful conversation, and it's been a real joy to be in conversation and to think about these works, and yes I want to encourage people, we didn't get to talk about it quite as much as we might have liked but “La Cueva Negra” (The Black Cave) is a longer piece by Beatriz that she's willing to share with us that you can all --- you have password, links, access to to watch until March 31st. And you have two works in an upcoming coming film festival, is that right Or one? Okay.
- (Beatriz Santiago Muñoz: If anybody is in New York, it's part of Art of the Real in Lincoln Center.
- (Saisha Grayson) Wonderful. Okay. Well. Rush out there and go see that. And then know we'll be back here next Wednesday for our next film screening on March 23rd again at 5:30 pm Eastern Time with the incredible Shirin Neshat, so please register for that one as well and join us and thank you all. And thank you all who joined us out there in cyberspace. Have a wonderful evening.
- (Beatriz Santiago Muñoz) Thank you everyone. Thanks for coming.
Watch the Conversation
On Wednesday, March 16, 2022, the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) hosted artist and filmmaker Beatriz Santiago Muñoz for a virtual film screening and conversation about her work that explores the picturesque landscapes, fraught histories, and complex demographics of Puerto Rico. In Otros Usos (Other Uses) (2014), Santiago Muñoz captures, through the view of a refracting prism, the deceptively beautiful island of Vieques, which the US military used as a weapons testing site for six decades. Through this creative play with light, reflection, and distance, the artist imagines other uses for this terrain after the military’s pressured exit from the island in 2003. In Gosila (2018), the artist explores the disordered aftermath of hurricane Maria. By presenting an intimate exploration of often-stereotyped spaces, Santiago Muñoz’s reflections on her home fracture expectations and illuminate her subjects in new ways. All artwork clips have been removed from this event recording.
Santiago Muñoz is joined in conversation by Taína Caragol, curator of painting and sculpture and Latino art and history at the National Portrait Gallery, and Saisha Grayson, curator of time-based media at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
This program was part of SAAM’s fourth annual Virtual Women Filmmakers Festival, which was presented completely online and ran from March 1-23, 2022, in honor of Women’s History Month. In 2022, the festival focused on the theme of “(Re)Making Space,” and featured the following artists: Sasha Wortzel, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, and Shirin Neshat. Through their artistic choices, the conventions they overturn, and the visionary insights they bring to each frame, each artist uses their cameras and imaginations to reshape how we see the world. Through powerful and experimental artworks, they invite us to examine our relationships to and deeper understandings of chosen landscapes.
This program was made possible by the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative, Because of Her Story, and was co-presented with the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.
Shirin Neshat
Internationally acclaimed artist ShirinNeshat (b. 1957, Qazvin, Iran) works across photography, film, video, and performance to consider the intersection of individual lives, imposed ideologies, and cultural divisions. Living in the US since Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979, Neshat creates art that reflects on contrasting experiences between women and men (in Iran and beyond), countries and regions, ideals and values, ancient and post-modern worlds, and entanglement and exile.
Virtual Screening with Artist Shirin Neshat
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On Wednesday, March 23, 2022, the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) hosted internationally acclaimed artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat for a virtual film screening and conversation about her latest body of work, "Land of Dreams" (2019-2021). Part fiction and part documentary, "Land of Dreams" is a multidisciplinary project that reflects on New Mexico’s diversity and fraught history. All artwork clips have been removed from this event recording. Neshat was joined in conversation by Adriel Luis, curator of digital & emerging practice at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, and Saisha Grayson, curator of time-based media at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
This program was part of SAAM’s fourth annual Virtual Women Filmmakers Festival, which was presented completely online and ran from March 1-23, 2022, in honor of Women’s History Month. In 2022, the festival focused on the theme of “(Re)Making Space,” and featured the following artists: Sasha Wortzel, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, and Shirin Neshat. Through their artistic choices, the conventions they overturn, and the visionary insights they bring to each frame, each artist uses their cameras and imaginations to reshape how we see the world. Through powerful and experimental artworks, they invite us to examine our relationships to and deeper understandings of chosen landscapes.
This program was made possible by the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative, Because of Her Story, and was co-presented with the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center.
-(Saisha Grayson) Hi. Welcome back. Sorry that final clip got cut off a little bit. But the swelling music, you can kind of tell it continues for a while. But thank you Shirin for joining me back on camera and Adriel as well. I wanted to include that final scene because in addition to just the beauty of the shot, it draws together so many of the things that are going on in this project and so while I invite you to say whatever you want coming out of that those two clips, I do hope that we can talk about how this feature film, which is going to come out this summer, as I said, really weaves together three projects you have been working on for so long. Maybe you can help set no up for the audience, if I didn't completely clarify that well enough in the intro.
-(Shirin Neshat) Well, first of all, thank you for inviting me. Thank you for all the audience who join us today. There are so many things to say about this project, both in terms of the form and the experimentation that was went into the way which we developed the video versus the movie based on same principle idea. And as you said, I worked on both video and movie cinema for a long time and photography. So it was the first time for me to develop an idea that could collapse into completely different mediums but still have same resonance, if I could say. But just to touch on what your last footage that you showed that unfortunately was not showing properly, is that it is perhaps the most visual moments of the feature film because, as you know, it is a fully narrated film. But for me, this really brought to attention the relationship between poetry, I am sorry, dreams and photography, which, you know, all this time that she was photographing people, collecting their dreams, but also she had an obsession with her own family photos and her own heritage as an Iranian, who somehow has a very traumatizing past.But somehow, for me this relationship between dream and photography is very poetic in a way that dreams are so ephemeral and vanish so quickly, you know. They are so impermanent. But there is something about photography and especially human portraiture that is so, that is like frozen in a moment, that is so permanent.
And you know, as she places these photographs of both her own family and the Americans who supposedly the two culture being each other's enemies, and yet our dreams are so similar. And so, I think there was something very powerful about the humanity in us and how our dreams bring us together. And how the images remain as who we are in many ways and life is so ephemeral. And it just for me for a film that was quite narrative, to end it on this kind of very evocative and poetic note, was to say something that ultimately what this film is about, is that everything is so ephemeral and that our humanity is what brings us together and we are going to die, and we are all made of anxiety, and nightmares, and those are very similar, regardless of where we come from, you see. And so because the whole film is about her as an Iranian versus American culture and her finding at the end is that, there is not really a big difference.
-(Saisha Grayson) That is so interesting. I love hearing you speak about that. I was really struck. Maybe this is where my head was at as I was thinking about this Festival in relationship to, sort of, specificity of land and particular grounding. And so, I was really interested in the gesture in which the photographs are being, sort of, wedded into the land and some sort of recognition yes, of this broader humanity but also of some sense of who we are, how we are shaped, is in relationship to this earth, right? Whether it is the global earth or these very specific places. I don't know. Adriel, what did you take from that scene or what was your first reaction to it?
-(Adriel Luis) Just love it all. I just love it all. Yeah, well. Hi everybody I am so glad to be here. Hi Shirin, Hi Saisha, I am tuning in from Tongva, also known as Los Angeles. And, I mean, New Mexico -- before this event, I was talking to everyone about how the last time I had been there was in 2019. But prior to the pandemic I hadn’t really been able to go often. And just this film was just like a portal back to some of these things that I love about this space, like, the sky is just very different out there and the way that the clouds kind of brush across. I loved seeing Ship Rock and a lot of the other landscapes. And I know we will see clips of some of the other works in this constellation. But you know, what I really loved was how New Mexico itself is sort of a character. It is a character in this film and in the video as well. And so, you know, there is a lot to speak about why I am interested in New Mexico and what draws me to it. But I am curious what Shirin why did you select New Mexico as this site, was it intentional or did you, you know, kind of, pick a place and then, sort of, have that unravel?
-(Shirin Neshat) Well, first of all, we traveled across America to choose that perfect state. And we are mostly Iranian people working together and we knew we wanted to look for a landscape that resembled Iran, basically I come from, a city that is in the middle of a desert landscape. And I have always had a love affair with the desert landscape. When you go to the Southwest it is just so extremely beautiful and there is so much reminiscence for us from the Iranian landscape. So we settled you know, we were thinking about Nevada, Utah, Colorado. But anyways we chose New Mexico. But also, I have to say that there was other reasons, is this the demographics. I mean, New Mexico is one of the poorest States in America and it does have a very diverse community of a large Native American community to Hispanic immigrants, as well as African Americans and of course the Anglo in many different economic class. And finally, there was something about my interest in cinema and in America for example in films that were shot in the Southwest like “Paris, Texas,” or “Thelma & Louise” the road movies. And since the construction of the film, there were six households and in between there were all these roads. It just perfectly lent itself to have plenty of time where we just go with the car from this house to that house. But I think for me, it was personally incredible joy to be in New Mexico. I really fell in love with this State for all the different reasons. So we shot the video in 2019. We went back in 2020 during the pandemic. So, I spent a lot of time there.
-(Saisha Grayson) That opens up sort of two questions that you can decide which one you want to answer first. One is, sort of, if New Mexico is one character that, sort of, stays through all these projects. The other one is Simin. And I was curious, you know, at what point did you recognize that this was going to be a multipart project? And when did you think about bringing those two kind of figures together, this dream-catcher, and the portrait-taker, and this, kind of, expansive landscape and these, kinds of, as you said, demographics that that would allow her to move through and think with?
-(Shirin Neshat) Yeah, I mean, first of all, I was clear about certain ideas that was going to be consistent regardless of the form. Whether it was video or the movie and that was that the woman had to be Iranian, photographer, living in exile, which is very much the echo of who I am.
-(Saisha Grayson) Yeah, she is your alter ego.
-(Shirin Neshat) And that I had obsessively filmed some of my own dreams. But I was now very obsessed with collecting other people's dreams. And also, I was really interested in this satirical storytelling of how, you know, Iranian people could be spying on Americans’ dreams and the idea that dreams become a point of a meeting between two enemies et cetera. But I knew that the video would be much more in line with my previous work, which would be much more enigmatic, that, you know, usually my videos are multi-channel videos that where the audience becomes almost like the editor of the piece as you will see soon with the clips that you will show. So there is a lot of the participation in the audience is demanded in terms of their comprehension of the story by the way in which they can simultaneously follow the narrative on two different channels, which is essentially showing the opposites. You have the open landscape, natural landscape. You have the industrial, claustrophobic landscape of the Iranian colony. You have dreams. You have reality. You have U.S. You have Iran. You have this internal world of this woman. You have this community that she visits. So, all of these ideas tie back into my earlier work like “Turbulent,” “Rapture,” some of the other more iconic work that I have done that were constituted around the notion of opposites. And always black and white. Magic realism. But with the movie, I knew that it had to be a scripted narrative, that it had to have development for it to last for two hours. And I went to Jean-Claude Carrière, who was one of the most important scriptwriters of the history of cinema who had sadly died just when this film was in editing phase at the age of 89. He worked extensively for Buñuel. And so when I came up with the idea of a woman, Iranian woman, being divided between a small American town and Iranian colony and how she could be a middle-person or a spy in between the two. He took that idea and came up with other characters, like, you know, the character of Mark and Alan, and fully developed script. And then we took that back and we worked for two years on a script. And that each household was, became kind of a short story with major characters that had their own developments, et cetera. So very much like the video, where she visits a few households, the movie also takes that kind of format, but just much more narrative if I could say.
-(Saisha Grayson) That’s so interesting. I think I had not really thought about the sequencing. Did you work on the script for the narrative at the same time as you were already shooting the video or did you have both scripts or treatments, kind of, ready to go so that you knew how they would intersect and, sort of, speak back to each other?
-(Shirin Neshat) The video is exactly how I imagined it, that there would be this dubious colony inserted inside of a mountain, totally unbelievable, where all these men, and women, in lab coats, Iranians, are secretly analyzing Americans' dreams and photographs. And then she goes with car every day to this American town and disguises herself as an artist and takes their pictures and dreams and comes back. This was exactly like that. But then when Jean-Claude and Shoja Azari, who was also my long-time collaborator, they started to delve into the script with my collaboration, we realized that actually in the movie the Iranian colony should take a step back and the American government should be the main protagonist, you know, in terms of the more sociological dimension of the film. And so we gave the Census Bureau the weight of the Colony in the video. But the idea was that she actually lives in America, not in the Colony like in the video. But there is this sense of duality, who she has as an Iranian, what she is conflicted about, her personal dilemma with her own political history, her family’s history. And yet the film being a kind of a social critique about America. And how the idea of the Census Bureau and the whole notion of surveillance over the American citizens of collecting people’s dreams became the more dominant force in the story that did not exist in the video. And this was the creation of Jean-Claude, and then with the help of Shoja, we then took some of this idea and then, sort of developed it further as unfortunately, he became ill later in the progression of the script. But so it was like where Shoja, Jean-Claude, and I met in terms of taking my original idea and then just developing it in different ways
-(Saisha Grayson) Yeah. I really like how you can see that valance kind of shift and the relationship between the two, is itself kind of dreamlike? They are similar. You think you know what is going to happen or what their relationship is. Then it will, kind of, veer off or shift the tonality, it will shift the emphasis of who the good guy and the bad guy, or who uses the terms but, you know, who this organization is that you are concerned about watching your every dream, that shifts too. But it is all in this nebulous way, where is, sort of, never pinned down. So is it the government. There also seems the implication of I was thinking about data management and you know, the kind of digital surveillance that we are all, sort of, participating in our lives too that has a lot to do with that kind psychology, desires, things that we maybe don't tell other people but we type into our phone.
-(Shirin Neshat) I just want to say, you know, in all of my work, there is always been this focus on the people of power, the people of authority, you know, the systems that rule either religion or state. And it made sense in the video that there is was this more focus on this antagonism between Iran and the U.S. and et cetera. And sort of that satirical way of talking. But in the movie, which was so much about America, it made sense that the dominant source of power was American administration, not Iran. Because she was Iranian. But this was no longer about Iran. That was just a kind of side story. So it made perfect sense that we alternate the focus of our story, in terms of the power structures about the American governance and slightly in the future where you have the bureaucracy of the Census Bureau is integrated with the corporate face of the Facebook, Twitter, and what we can see in the future that the corporation could have a hand in like they had in the election. So I think what why we welcomed what Jean-Claude did was that it brought the focus to the American government, where with the video it was equal about U.S. and Iran. Does that make sense?
-(Saisha Grayson) Absolutely.
-(Adriel Luis) Yeah, I feel, you know, the thing about New Mexico that I was surprised by was how present the government is there. When I was traveling, I was living in D.C., and it was a very different kind of presence than in D.C. And you know, throughout the film, there are points where people are deciding whether or not they want to share a dream and then at least two times the reasoning is like, this sort of patriotic duty to like, share something so private. And I am just so curious about that because, you know, the reason I was out there, I was working on a film about how Navajo people have, you know, been affected by nuclear histories and so it all similar to Simin, I was like going around with these artists, Lovely Umayam and Kayla Briët asking people these really deeply personal things. And even though we weren't representing the government the fact that we were coming from D.C., it sort of, you know, created a kind of dynamic. I just wonder, could you talk a bit more about that idea of the U.S. government's presence in a place like New Mexico?
-(Shirin Neshat) It was interesting because in 2019, when we first went to make the artwork, which included a hundred and eleven photographs, I literally photographed over 200 people. The ddea was to ask each subject about their dreams and their relationship to this country. And it was very fascinating. But also, for the video, I did what the protagonist did in the film. I went door to door and knocked at the doors and introduced myself as an Iranian artist who’s trying to make a project from the perspective of an immigrant about America and how I was very obsessively asking for people’s dreams and to take their pictures. Some people said they just get lost. And some people said please come in. And so, the art project had this semi-documentary aspect to it because I was literally a part of this project, you know, by being active in the community, throwing myself in there, asking people about their lives, asking about their dreams and how, you know, I consequently got really close to them. I bonded with them as another immigrant, as another minority. And it was fascinating to see how their dreams were so much similar to mine, et cetera. And that obviously the communities that I visited were a lot of them were marginalized. I spent a lot of time with Native Americans and Hispanic immigrants living in Albuquerque as well as African Americans. I really wanted to be, you know, making sure that the project is very inclusive of very diverse group of people, within the State of New Mexico. But with the movie, it was completely a fiction. It was really developed. There was not very much of kind of documentary style to it. You see what I am saying? But I did, for example, study quite a lot about what the function of the Census Bureau is, and so, you know, a lot of research went into it. But it was pure fiction. But I would really say that I felt that literally I played a role in the video that, you know, by putting myself out there and talking to so many hundreds of people and then having someone else play me, it was really where life and art were just sort of coming in close proximity, like nothing else I have ever experienced.
-(Adriel Luis) Yeah. I think that sense of bond and community is some I learned that is so important because, like you said, you know, it is there is a lot of impoverished people there, it is kind of a place where a lot of filmmakers and authors will come in, kind of, take interviews, and then make their project and then kind of disappear. And something that I heard from a lot of Navajo folks was that for them, you know, the part of the due diligence of, you know, actually recognizing that the relationship goes beyond just a single project. So I think I really love the fact that this is not just a single film or single video but really this constellation and something that has really shifted who you are as a person, as an artists, as well.
-(Shirin Neshat) And I have to add that with every family, every household, like for example, the Native Americans, we made sure that we consulted with them about what we had originally scripted and what we had in mind, as a dream for a Native and whether that was correct. In fact, you know, first of all, at the beginning when we went, the film commission told us never go into the reservation, they never like to be photographed or filmed. They are not really interested in collaboration. That's not true. And when I went there, I remember I just knocked on someone's door and literally they welcomed us. So, when originally we told them what we had in mind for the dream, for the native lady. They said, no, no, no, that is really incorrect. That is just not. And they told us, for example, the dream that is in the video, it is exactly of something that they shared with us as how as young natives they were taken away to the convents from the age of seven until eighteen and to be taken away from the family to forget their language and their religion and be converted into Christianity. We went to this convent, which was abandoned by then. And it was horrific scene. And so, we recreated the nightmare of this native lady who said I often have a nightmare about my child, end up where I was for many years and how they were always angry at their parents because they were separated and they thought that the family let them. They didn't know it was by force. So or the military man that we talked about his serving in the military and the nuclear tests that they did in New Mexico. So what I am trying to say is that much of the dreams that eventually were put in the film were in consultation and collaboration with the people who actually we worked with, some of whom, most of whom were not actors. They were regular people. And this was really different from the movie.
-(Saisha Grayson) Yeah. If I may take that as an opportunity, we actually have most of those scenes as selections, because, you know, we share the link and password with everybody. You can watch on it your own time. But maybe you didn't watch it yet. So as we are talking about this, I thought it would be helpful to actually be able to, sort of, visually see it. And then you can know you want to go and watch the whole thing later, after the talk. So Cal, can you play those two dreams, and then we will come back and talk about them?
-(Saisha Grayson) So the dreams are so poignant and it is now even more knowing that you, like Simin, actually gathered those right from conversations from trust with people you met, is very powerful to kind of understand and process, the first time I seen them with that knowledge.
-(Shirin Neshat) Thank you. I mean, the idea was that ultimately both in the movie and in the video that we have a diversity of themes, even within the dreams. Because the more common dreams that we seem to find among people is fear of violence, abandonment, displacement, war, Nuclear Holocaust, and so, you know, fear of death. And so in the few households in the video that we visited, we tried to sort of identify different themes of dreams. And we had an immigrant and we had a native who is white American. So, we had different people of different economic and racial backgrounds. And the same in the film. We have an African American. We have a native. We have wealthy. We have poor. We have, you know, different and that for me, just like that photographs, the video and the movies, to me is a portrait of America from the perspective of a person who is an immigrant. And so I am very clear about it, this would not be the same point of view from someone who is born in this country. But the diversity that I show among the households, among the dreams, among the faces and the portraitures in the photographic installation is the way I see this country, the way I relate to this country. And that I felt that whole idea of the "Land of Dreams," which was associated with America was slowly kind of being compromised. So there is this agenda on my part of being vocal about the fact that this film is being made by a person who is an outsider and also Simin is my own alter ego, is a person that is not exactly integrating among her own community of Iranians, like I won't, because I have been living outside longer than, you know, in my own country, but also not exactly integrating within the American culture – so this idea of the loneliness or the being the outcast, this person was constantly being divided politically, emotionally, culturally between two different places. And that I think the last thing I want to say is that, the discovery I had as an artist, as a human being working with "Land of Dreams" was me discovering how much I identified with other minorities in this country, in the way that I never thought I would. I always thought I would have to rush to the Iranian communities to feel like one. But I actually, you know in a very wonderful way, I found that I completely relate to the struggle of other minority groups including African Americans, and the Natives, and the other immigrants. Anyways, for me it was an opening, kind of departure as an artist and as a human being, I think.
-(Saisha Grayson) No, no. You go.
-(Adriel Luis) I was just going to say that, I mean, it really occurred to me watching that scene again, that I can't think of any other situation on film or broadly where we get to watch a conversation between a Native American and immigrant character. Like That dialogue, that whole story, it is just, we don't get to see it really, you know. I mean, I feel like immigrant stories and Native American stories oftentimes considered mutually exclusive in the field of American history but a place like New Mexico is really where you do get that kind of convergence. I spent a lot of time in Gallup, New Mexico and there was around the border where during the World War II the Japanese American incarceration, where, you know, West Coast Japanese Americans were put in concentration camps. So right at that border. So, Gallup was one of the towns where they refused to allow people to take the Japanese Americans. And that is is a town that is largely in Navajo. And so, I just think about, kind of, you know, what was happening in that time period, and you know, now in Gallup there is a lot of Philipino immigrants who are caring for Native Americans, who have been affected by, you know, the toxins of Uranium mining. And so I wonder, could you talk a little bit more, Shirin, about that? Were you kind of on a mission to convey something, or do you feel like it was just something that came out a bit naturally for you?
-(Shirin Neshat) It is I am so glad you brought this up because I remember that, you know, first of all, I lived in this country for since 1975. I never met Native Americans except one person. And I think that is really shocking, you know. And so when I met this man who actually plays in the movie, Larry King, and I got to hear his story, his family. He’s a fantastic storyteller. He was so curious about me as an Iranian. I just couldn't believe how much questions he had about where I came from. Even the landscape of Iran, the religion of Islam, my relationship to the country today, and to this country, and the music, and everything, is like he never met an Iranian before. And I never really met or really gotten close to a Native and so then he invited me and my two friends also women to their family reunion for her mother's birthday. And I was just beyond myself, going into this very intimate gathering and seeing their ritual, their ceremony of prayers, and food-eating, and this incredible landscape they lived yet extreme poverty. And that dichotomy just sort of really and I remember on the way there, I am being very intimate on this talk but on the way there I wanted to buy a gift so we went to a place to buy meat as a gift. And even though that shop was within the reservation, they would not acknowledge my friend who was a native but they would sell to me. I was just so aware of the racism that still existed and how they had to still really struggle to maintain their integrity as a community, and the issues of economy, and control of the government. So, I think that knowing that I came from a very problematic past of a government who is dictatorship. How I live in exile because of who I am and the kind of control that sort of rules the Iranian society and the kind of control that they were facing as a community and incarceration, and the way that they were still struggling to maintain a sense of dignity. I was so related to that and how they were a foreigner in their own land, you know. And how I felt a foreigner in this country, yet a foreigner in respect to my own country. So, it just brought up all these issues that we had in common, as people who were displaced or at least for me, displaced. I don’t know. I think they felt also in some ways. We just bonded because we had so much in common in a way I never thought I would have so much common with the Native American. And I think that is the nature of the "Land of Dreams" in the way that the universality of themes that we find through connecting to other people's dreams, which are really a projection of our anxieties and our fears. And we find that, of course we are conditioned to different societies, and different governments, and different power system and tyranny. But we are also so human and we are all like filled with the same sense of anxieties. In our dreams are the only things that they don't acknowledge cultural differences. It is just what is really common human experience, you know. And I think that anyway, I just wanted to…
-(Saisha Grayson) So beautiful. And it is definitely what I responded to when seeing the video first, was this, you know, I work at the American Art Museum so I have a vested interest in projects that, you know, where I see an artist I have been following for years suddenly turn their eye to this context, but then what you found here was a way of looking at a situation that very often gets sort of, as you said, divided up or treated separately and seeing the internal diaspora as well as the international diaspora and that they are actually so much interrelated in that space and in that configuration. But it is also interesting for me to hear you because there is this universality of the dreams. But for me I was also so struck by how much each of them is about unearthing, kind of, these traumas that are or these violences that are part of the American history that get repressed and that are not spoken aloud and that may be the dreams are the only places we are allowed to process or acknowledge the history of Native American children being stolen or militarism being the core under this landscape, this beautiful landscape that is so dramatically you know, lovingly treated by your camera is also the landscape of this toxic, military nuclear history. And that is being unearthed by the dreams. And there is one other dream that actually we heard a little bit the clip in the film at the end when you hear the woman whose precious elephants are being taken by dirty little children who were going to drop them and destroy them. And that dream just had so much palpable of the, sort of, white anxiety of something that you believe is yours and shouldn't be taken or is being invaded by the other. And it felt both, yes, of course, everybody has that anxiety. But the way it was teased out and structured felt so particular to this moment in American history where this question of claiming and feeling ownership over something that you have already stolen is so interesting. And so I was wondering if you could talk more about that dream?
-(Shirin Neshat) Yes. I mean, one of the things I have to confess, I mean, I just want to say one thing is that, with this project, also, I realize that for so long I say I am Iranian. But with this project I say I am very American. I feel that I really came to terms with the reality that I must consider myself completely American and allow myself to have, to give my perspective about the country that I have spent so many years in here. But the one thing that was very difficult and challenging is also not to be overly biased or have my own sort of agenda in terms of pointing finger of specific type of people in America or because I have never interested in being critical of anybody. I just always been interested in raising certain questions but never really, sort of, answering any questions. But for me, because we often talk about the Middle East, Iran as people of religion. I think in this country, religion is also a major factor, a very dominant part of the American society. And so in this particular scene that you are talking about and in the movie if you have seen it, hopefully some friends will see, there is an entire scene in a Church with a priest who is, anyway, it is a complicated scene. Yeah. But I felt that among the topics to touch on in American society, is the issue of religion and those who are extremely faithful. Just like a lot of Muslims are. And that faith makes them often racist or sees things in a very polaric way. And so the house that we visited that, we filmed this blonde lady’s home, was actually belong to a woman who was very hardcore Republican and had this figures of elephants, which are symbol of the Republicans. She was a Sunday painter or whatever. And she was just lovely. And she we didn't change anything in that house. But essentially, the dream became of a woman whose husband is a missionary. And she worries about, and you know, as you saw all those icons, religious icons everywhere of the Madonna, that it would be broken by some crappy kids. And yeah, this was something that was partially made up but partially was from what we collected and from someone like that. But, yeah, we didn't change much of that household. It was very much the lady who lived there was very much like that.
-(Saisha Grayson) Well, it is almost time to turn to audience questions and we’ve got many and they are very long. So I am going to ask Adriel do you have any last questions you want to make sure we touch on while I try to process some of these?
-(Adriel Luis) All of them. I mean, well. First of all, it was good to hear Larry King’s name. And the Red Water Pond Community, and to know that you connected with him, you know. I think of him when I think about just, sort of, one of the people who expressed how oftentimes outsiders come in and, kind of, extract stories. And so it is really good to hear that you have formed that connection with him because it is just really a testament to the amount of care that you and your crew took in working on these projects. So, I just really want to commend you for that. I guess if there is a specific question about the film, I was curious about, you know like, I was pulling quotes from the film that really kind of called to me. And you know, there is a part where Alan, Matt Dillon’s character says that he is going to take Simin to the land of roses and nightingales. So, I liked looked up land of roses and Nightingales and saw that it is a collection of Persian fairytales. And then I started falling down this wormhole of, like nightingales in dreams, and if they are building a nest, it means that a relative or close friend is going to come back and see you. I mean, it was all like just quick Googling. So, I don't know if any of that was actual material. But I am curious, you know. You were talking about elephants. But onto nightingales which appear a few times in the film. How does that factor in your idea of this dreamscape?
-(Shirin Neshat) First of all, in the movie, there was two things running parallel. First of all, what was happening in terms of the American government and whole political structure. But the other is this woman’s personal life, personal history and what traumatized her, which was her that her father was originally a political activist and was executed by the government, which is very common for a lot of people of that generation during the revolution. So we always felt that the Colony in a way became her nightmare, you know, maybe the whole film could be a dream. But the Colony became a place where she really had to because when she was outside of the Colony she was more like spying on people's dreams and impersonating them, and putting it on social media. But every time that it came back to the Colony, it was a return to the past that was very dark and really haunted her, and eventually shook her up and she never became stable again because it was a reminiscence of this terrible history that and her father endured. And so the idea of how much the Census Bureau was conscious of where they were taking her and how much they had a role in throwing her in this dark tunnel, you know, because if you watch the film you see that they have her personal history, they know her father was executed. Just like FBI does, just like CIA does. Like when we come to the government, through the custom immigration, you would be surprised how much information they have about us. So she is in a way haunted by her own past, this dictatorship, this very oppressive past. But at the same time, the American government who is sort of playing with her mind, and really just sort of pushing her on the edge. And so, to be more specific, we did use a lot of references to Persian poetry and symbolic metaphoric forms that sort of represented something within the Iranian context. So, there was a lot of that in play, which Shoja Azari, my husband, he had a lot to do with that. But there was a lot of also satire in the Colony, where you have all these Iranian men and women in their 60s and 70s dressed in, you know, military outfits still trying to overthrow the Iranian government. They had not even been to Iran for 30, 40 years. So, there was something very satirical about and absurd about that. So, everything was sort of unbelievable and meant to be.
-(Saisha Grayson) I think there is a wonderful relief that comes from that because the militarism that is embedded in the landscape and the video is so haunting and very, you know, resonant with real traumas of that space. And then this kind of way you are allowing that to become kind of funny and actually tease it through the Colony was a sense of relief I had in terms of letting that have a little --
-(Shirin Neshat) I have to share with you a secret. Where we filmed the Colony in the movie is where the American government trains their soldiers to attack Afghanistan, to fight Taliban. So, they have actually built all the streets and mosques. And I mean literally they created this village on top of a mountain near the border of Mexico where they fly in the soldiers to do SWAT teams and all that. And it was really ironic because it is where they trained soldiers. And you know, and it was kind of sad. It was just very ironic, anyway.
-(Saisha Grayson) You turned into humor. Okay, so I want to ask two questions that I think touch on some of what you were just talking about. One is about symbolism. Symbolism in your work is very prominent. And this is a particular detail that somebody pulled out from the scene where she is laying photographs on the ground. She noticed that the first photograph has three figures in full body length and you really see them. And all the others are portrait faces. And they wanted to know sort of about that difference in the choice of that.
-(Shirin Neshat) Well, if you see the movie, Simin doesn't have many things but she has one big suitcase. We don't know what is inside of it. We find out it is all family photos that she takes from place to place. And these are photos of her as young person with her mother, with her father. And this is the only thing she has left from her past is a suitcase of images, which most of us as immigrants we try to take with us. But the other images are people who she photographs. The people who they share their dreams. And I may be very honest with you. These are all my photographs that I took. And those images of the families are combination of Sheila Vand, the actress' family, mainly hers and some of mine. So the intention was that all this time she was hiding and keeping her family's photos as like she was attached to it. And then eventually, she had to let go. And she put together images. And she started this spiral which to me, is a reminiscence of Robert Smithson's Land Arts, you know. Where she started with this images of small little pictures from Iran, which happened to be full body , but they are small, and then, she left them be she gives them back to the earth, you know. And eventually, you know, this is the Iranian people, right. And eventually comes to portraits of people that are Americans that she photographed that they were all these strangers to her. So for me, it was this play of starting with who you are and then eventually coming to the world and then all are meshed together. And then when the camera goes up, we all become one. So there was the only picture really we had of the family pictures were the white oneit was not really intentional but it is what we had and it was really our family photos.
-(Saisha Grayson) Yeah. Another question about her when she goes the Colony or actually in a couple places, somebody said that they are working on a dissertation on the issue of inbetweenness. And they see the face of the foreigner as a mask that plays her own life. And do you see that in Neshat's work? And I wanted to know more about Simin's speaking Farsi. The accent of the protagonist is mechanical, not emotional, as if Simin is a mask. And there is a kind of mechanicalness to the interviewees, too. Is that something to read into? I know that you mentioned that the accent wasn’t sort of was like somebody who has not lived there for
-(Shirin Neshat) Well, in the video, I mean, first of all, in Farsi she has an accent because she actually, you know, she lived outside. The whole idea for the video she was working for a Colony who considered Americans as an enemy. But the more she went inside American community in this small town, the more she started to identify with the enemy. She emotionally became attached or related to them in the way that was forbidden. So what she did eventually what she was looking for in the library was that what would be the punishment for someone to identify with the enemy. And that's what it was. That she became emotionally connected to her subjects. She was catched later and punished and thrown out. In the movie, she was just being very mechanical. She just wanted people's dreams. So she could later impersonate them. And this is you know, she, at the beginning of the film, all she wanted to do was to work for the Census because of the job of collecting people's dreams because she had an alternative motive which was take this dream, translate them into Farsi. She’s this lonely person who always stays in her hotel. Her only relationship to the world was the social media. And again, this is in the near future. So the only community she has was these virtual people. So she translated it. So her only obsession was “let me catch these people's dreams and impersonated them.” But if you watch the movie, the 2-hour. You’ll eventually see that things change. Again, just like in the video, she goes as a spy. She tries to collect dreams. But eventually things happen. She cannot separate herself from the people and their dreams. She eventually becomes invested in their lives and emotionally affected by them. And by the end of the film, she is a very different person than what she started with. There is a transformation.
-(Saisha Grayson) Yeah. I mean. In the scene we opened with, she is so snarky. The manipulativeness of like, “Oh, no, I need them twice.” Like, there is a real way in which you can feel her sort of playing with them. Here is a really interesting question, if the New Mexican desert is one of the major characters in this project. How’d you see ITS character? Apart from being stunningly beautiful, it would seem hostile and really difficult to live in for people who come there recently, maybe without comforts of AC or electricity. So does it have its own inherent character, separate from these histories or whatever?
-(Shirin Neshat) It’s a really interesting question. And I think there is a hardship of living in bare landscape, as beautiful as they are. I mean, that's you know, that is a question I think more for the people who live there for a long time. I know that, you know, there is something extremely mystical and spiritual about being in the vicinity of this incredible landscape but like I said a lot of the Natives that we met, they live so far away from everything, that the practicality of that lifestyle is really, there is a lot of hardship. We visited many people who lived very isolated in the middle of nowhere. And they were quite far, you know, from any civilization, food, and gas, and all that. But there was a choice that they made to live in a very isolated way. But there is something extremely incredible about New Mexico also about the diversity of the landscape and how why different people for different reasons have taken refuge there including Georgia O'Keeffe, or Ernest Martin, to Bruce Nauman, to name a few artists, you know, to a lot of writers to filmmakers to intellectuals. A lot of people have decided to live in Albuquerque or Galisteo, or a lot of different beautiful places to make art. And I think that is one of the fascination, the hardship but yet the mystery behind this landscape that is so inspirational, I think for many people.
-(Adriel Luis) Yeah, I mean, I think with New Mexico, this idea of the land being hostile, I think, you know, something that I heard a lot out there is you know, I mean, the land is the land, right. Even though Uranium in the land is the Uranium. And then what is it that actually makes something hostile, right. You know, New Mexico has like 16 Superfund sites. You just can’t go in. You will get contaminated with radiation. But that is people that did that, right. There are these elements in the ground that had been there for millennia. But it was the intervention of military intervention of government that actually turned it so that these elements and the dynamic between the land and the people became a hostile relationship. So I think it is interesting to think about whether or not that is actually something that would describe New Mexico itself or I guess like the western human history of the space.
-(Shirin Neshat) And the last thing I want to say is that I was very impressed by how the Navajo Nation, their communities were very much working in protecting their sacred mountains and landscape. They were extremely picky in terms of how it was used, who was using it. And they took a lot of, you know, it very precious for them what they had. And so I was really very impressed by how their relationship with their landscape and how much they worked hard to protect its values, really.
-(Saisha Grayson) Well, we are really close to time so I am going to ask one more question because it feels very poignant and pointed. Rebecca says I was surprised Shirin thought the American Dream was somehow being eroded? Was it ever really real or was it just a dream that people bought into? So I think that is a curious question. Sort of what spending a lot of time thinking about sort of what has changed in the American Dream, but what do we think about it as a core idea?
-(Shirin Neshat) I mean, of course, I can only speak from my own perspective. But you know, I came to this country since 1975. And I never really personally felt a huge amount of racism or discrimination. And I remember when I started to have problem with my own country and my own government, you know, I almost couldn't leave the country for whatever reason. And I entered, it was 1996, I remember coming back to the JFK. And I remember very well, after very, very difficult departure from Iran. An African American immigration officer said to me, “Welcome Home.” And I just burst into tears because I realized that, you know, America does give me the sense of freedom and democracy that nowhere else does. I never felt safe in Europe. Certainly, didn't feel safe in my own country. And that I felt good. I felt like I am who I am because of this country. I am educated here. I was alone since young adulthood. You know, I really feel like this country made my dreams come true. Until a few years ago where and after September 11 where there was this experience, I really began to feel discrimination and racism. And I felt that the whole fabric of the society was shifting in all the wrong direction. And you know, especially since Trump Administration. And I think it was at that moment, that I felt that people like myself also need to take responsibility to defend what is great about this society and how it’s created and built by the blood of immigrants and how we need to insist that this is what America is about and its identity. And I really this is my belief that this is a great country. And there is a great values about this country that I cherish and I love more than anywhere else. I don't want to go anywhere else. But if I see that there is something wrong, and I come from a country that doesn't give you the freedom of expression. Here it does. And I am going speak about it. And I am going make work about it. And yet still I feel there is fantastic values that I really worship about America and that’s showing in the work.
-(Saisha Grayson) Well, okay. I am going to tear up. I am going say thank you. What a note to end on. Adriel, I invite you, do you want to add anything to that, before we to say huge thanks all around.
-(Adriel Luis) Just such an honor to be in conversation with the both of you. I just respect both of you so much. And I admire you so much, you know. When I saw your exhibition at the Hirshhorn, Shirin, it really changed the way that I thought about immigration and diaspora and what art can do just to speak on that. So if I could just kind of be a fan boy for a second, I just want to say that. Thank you so much.
-(Shirin Neshat) I wanted to thank you both. Really, you have so generous and kind. There is so much to cover between a feature film and video and the whole project. I think we touched on important things. And I just want to say thank you for both of you and the Museum for this invitation. I wish we were not virtual and in person. But we’ll see in the future.
-(Saisha Grayson) Next year, we will make it happen. But yeah, so thank you for joining even in this less than, you know, physical space. I feel like I have shared presence with both of you. As you said, there is so much to get to. And also with audience questions, I am sorry we couldn't get to all of them. But thank you for all of them, they are all great. I am noticing in the chat that some people didn't see the link in their e-mails so I want to say aloud. SAAMPrograms@si.edu you can email to make sure you get that. I also want to remind everyone that this conversation with the clips included will be available on our website through April 8th, along with the other conversations we’ve had. And then at April 8th, it turns over and we take the artworks out just to be respectful of people's work, but the conversations remain. So if you want to revisit that beautiful comment that Shirin closed us out with, that will be there for perpetuity. So thank you again everyone and have a wonderful evening. Enjoy your night.
-(Shirin Neshat) Thank you so much everyone. Have a great evening.
-(Adriel Luis) Good night everybody.
-(Shirin Neshat) Bye.
Watch the Conversation
On Wednesday, March 23, 2022, the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) hosted internationally acclaimed artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat for a virtual film screening and conversation about her latest body of work, Land of Dreams (2019-2021). Part fiction and part documentary, Land of Dreams is a multidisciplinary project that reflects on New Mexico’s diversity and fraught history. All artwork clips have been removed from this event recording. Neshat was joined in conversation by Adriel Luis, curator of digital & emerging practice at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, and Saisha Grayson, curator of time-based media at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
This program was part of SAAM’s fourth annual Virtual Women Filmmakers Festival, which was presented completely online and ran from March 1-23, 2022, in honor of Women’s History Month. In 2022, the festival focused on the theme of “(Re)Making Space,” and featured the following artists: Sasha Wortzel, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, and Shirin Neshat. Through their artistic choices, the conventions they overturn, and the visionary insights they bring to each frame, each artist uses their cameras and imaginations to reshape how we see the world. Through powerful and experimental artworks, they invite us to examine our relationships to and deeper understandings of chosen landscapes.
This program was made possible by the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative, Because of Her Story, and was co-presented with the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center.
Credit
Women Filmmakers Festival at SAAM is made possible by the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative, Because of Her Story.
