Meet artist-in-residence Sofía Gallisá Muriente during an informal presentation and discussion in the artist’s studio at Fonderie Darling. During this open-studio event, the artist will share developments about her residency project Observatorio de lagunas, a long-term platform for transdisciplinary research about the state of memory and the work of remembering in Puerto Rico. By exploring the double meaning of the word laguna in Spanish (both a lagoon and a lacuna), the artist is interested in drawing connections between the dynamic coastal lagoon ecosystems and the absences and gaps that signal forgetting.

SOFÍA GALLISÁ MURIENTE

Sofía Gallisá Muriente’s process is largely intuitive and develops through long periods of research, observation and conversation, accumulating materials and thinking through them with others.  Collaboration is essential to her artistic practice and is also shaped by her context in other ways, responding to unexpected connections and poetic coincidences typical of life in a small place. Her current projects reflect on the work of remembering and how images, produced through varying technologies, have the capacity to mitigate the loss of a place, a person or a memory.

Sofía Gallisá Muriente is a Puerto Rican visual artist whose work resists colonial forces of erasure. She has been a resident artist of Museo La Ene (Argentina), Alice Yard (Trinidad & Tobago), Solar (Canary Islands), and FAARA (Uruguay), as well as a fellow of the Flaherty Seminar and the Smithsonian Institute. From 2014 to 2020, she codirected the artist-run, non-profit organization Beta-Local, fostering knowledge exchange and transdisciplinary practices in Puerto Rico. She is currently a fellow of the Puerto Rican Arts Initiative and the Annenberg Innovation Lab at USC.