Monique Wittig’s 1969 novel Les Guérillères envisions the aftermath of a violent war of the sexes in a future where women have toppled the patriarchy. Santiago Muñoz’s work That which identifies them, like the eye of the cyclops, takes Wittig’s text as source of inspiration. Her three-channel video installation follows a group of real women—all friends and collaborators of the artist’s in her community in and around San Juan, Puerto Rico—as they tend to farm animals, play music, and occupy protest sites at government buildings, not as a speculative vision about what might be, but as a provocation of how an imagined future can be actualized in the present.

In conjunction with this exhibition, Western Front will be hosting Muñoz and her collaborator Marién Velez for a short residency to further develop and perform a new performance that extends from Wittig’s novel and the work they did together in the process of making the video.

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz lives and works in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her work arises out of long periods of observation and documentation, in which the camera is present as an object with social implications and as an instrument mediating aesthetic thought. Her films frequently start out through research into specific social structures, individuals, or events, which she transforms into moving image, at times supported by objects and texts. Santiago Muñoz’s recent work has been concerned with post-military land, Haitian poetics, and the sensorial unconscious of anti-colonial movements. Recent solo exhibitions include: Song, Strategy, Sign at the New Museum, A Universe of Fragile Mirrors at the Pérez Art Museum of Miami, MATRULLA, Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, México City; Post-Military Cinema, Glasgow International; The Black Cave, Gasworks, London. Her work is included in public and private collections, such as the Whitney Museum, Solomon Guggenheim Museum, and Kadist.