*Dear all:*
*Please see info below on this upcoming programme <https://alchemyfilmandarts.org.uk/festival-2023-events-calligraphic-landscapes/?fbclid=IwAR3RJ07jOSAYtpC0HZ2WwazvcxkUjdUWxYK71PfHo7mJ-k4aaj_qKLqqWlo> at Alchemy Film & Arts (Hawick, Scotland), which I guest curated, with the participation of Puerto Rican artists Sofía Gallisá Muriente and Emilia Beatriz.* *See info here on the Festival <https://alchemyfilmandarts.org.uk/festival/> more broadly.* *All best wishes,* *Jessica* *CALLIGRAPHIC LANDSCAPES: LETTERS ACROSS WIND AND WATER* *HEART OF HAWICK* *FRIDAY 28 APRIL* *14:30 – 16:30* / 90′ *Content warning: **contains flashing imagery; discussion of colonialism, death.* ------------------------------ *PROGRAMME NOTES* by Dr Jessica Gordon-Burroughs This programme of films, letters, readings and performance centres on the continuities and discontinuities between Scotland and Puerto Rico, as a conversation between the Global South and North, but also as shared colonial spaces. The programme features a little-known correspondence between Puerto Rican and Scottish calligraphers Lorenzo Homar and Stuart Barrie as a springboard to consider broader dynamics and points of tension between the two spaces. Excerpts from this correspondence, creatively and speculatively rendered, are read by Puerto Rican artist filmmaker *Sofía Gallisá Muriente*, whose *Assimilate and Destroy I* also opens and closes the programme. Wind and water, a nautical reference, points toward a sense of vulnerability, but also toward the process of writing and corresponding across the ocean. The concept of letters and the ‘calligraphic’ gestures toward broad figurations of writing: writing in the natural world; writing with the voice; writing with the body; as ways of imprinting and inflecting time and the self upon seemingly anonymous and monolithic structures and social configurations. In the companion zine *Grief into Action*, honey, bees and sisterhood are paired with the healing properties of salt – which, in *Assimilate and Destroy I*, is both absorbed by and erodes the filmic surface. At the programme’s centre is the video and archival work *a crossing (1698/2003)* by Glasgow-based Puerto Rican artist *Emilia Beatriz *with *Kiera Coward-Deyell *and *Andrés Nieves*, who will also perform the work after it screens. In that performance, the human voice activates alternative narratives pushing up against layered histories of colonial aspirations and military occupation on Vieques, an island east of the Puerto Rican mainland. Herein the mythic overlaps with Vieques’s dense historical emplotment. Contrasting an almost despairing militarism with the resistant politics of care, *a crossing (1698/2003) *invests bees, crabs, and the human form with an unexpected potentiality for collective action, rebellion, and sedition. Cape Wrath in Scotland’s North serves as a troubling counterpoint, a parallel militarised territory, both colonised and colonising. *Research for this programme was supported by funding from a Carnegie Research Incentive Grant from the Carnegie Trust. **The excerpted letters are courtesy of the Centro de Documentación de Arte Puertorriqueño del Museo de Historia, Antropología y Arte (Universidad de Puerto Rico Recinto de Río Piedras). **Many thanks to Susan Homar, Araceli Ortiz-Azancot, and Flavia Marichal. * ------------------------------ *PROGRAMME* *ASSIMILATE AND DESTOY I* Sofía Gallisá Muriente 2’31 – Puerto Rico – 2018 *A CROSSING (1698/2003)* Emilia Beatriz 10’04 – Scotland, Puerto Rico – 2022 The programme will also include readings from Sofía Gallisá Muriente and a performance of *a crossing (1698/2003)* by Emilia Beatriz. *ARTIST BIOS* *Sofía Gallisá Muriente* is a Puerto Rican visual artist working mainly with video, film, photography, and text. Through multiple approaches to documentation, her work deepens the subjectivity of historical narratives, examining formal and informal archives, popular imaginaries and visual culture. She earned a BFA in Film & TV Production and Latin American Studies at New York University and has participated in experimental pedagogical platforms led by artists, like Anhoek School and Beta-Local’s La Práctica, substituting graduate studies with a collaborative process of learning and unlearning. She has been a resident artist of Museo La Ene (Argentina), Alice Yard (Trinidad & Tobago), Solar (Tenerife), and Catapult, as well as a fellow of the Flaherty Seminar and the Smithsonian Institute. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Art in America, Terremoto, and Hyperallergic, and earned her grants from TEOR/éTica and NALAC. She has exhibited in the Whitney Biennial, the Queens Museum, the Getty’s PST: LA/LA, ifa Galerie in Berlin, MAC in Puerto Rico, MALBA in Argentina and CCA Glasgow, among others. From 2014 to 2020 she was Co-director of the artist-run, non-profit organization Beta-Local, dedicated to fostering knowledge exchange and transdisciplinary practices in Puerto Rico. She is currently also a fellow of the Puerto Rican Arts Initiative. *Emilia Beatriz* is an artist, organiser and beekeeper in-study. Emilia uses film, photography, text, sound and performance to re-imagine embodied histories of land, healing and resistance, focusing on intergenerational and inter-species listening, grief-work, and ecological struggle as decolonial world-building practices. Emilia’s practice is underpinned by workshops, oral histories, community archiving, work with Collective Text, and collaborating as Letitia Beatriz aka *~care and rage*~. She was the eleventh recipient of the Margaret Tait Award, Scotland’s most prestigious moving image prize for artists inspired by the pioneering Orcadian filmmaker and poet Margaret Tait.
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