Feminisms in the Caribbean. Thinking with Places and Objects – Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
The podcast Promise No Promises! opens a new chapter called “Feminisms in the Caribbean”. This series of 4 new episodes arises from personal conversations between curator and writer Sonia Fernández Pan and art practitioners from the Caribbean region. The collaboration is part of the public program of the past exhibition "one month after being known in that island" at the Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger with the Caribbean Art Initiative.The changeful history of the colonization of the Caribbean has left deep scars that are still present today. This is best known by artists and cultural practitioners who work in their own way on an identity of its own for the Antilles. The term “Caribbean” here is used primarily in a geographical sense to help overcoming local antagonisms between different political systems, languages and cultures, while allowing artists of all origins to exchange ideas and thus work together on a Caribbean identity. This series of podcasts aims to engage with a plurality of voices from different backgrounds to think with them on the diversity implicit in the notion of identity. The first episode follows a conversation with artist Beatriz Santiago Muñoz. Her projects involve long periods of contact, observation and documentation of the places she chose to work with. Beatriz is aware of the camera as an experiential device and aesthetic instrument that expands the perception of the human eye and psyche, and a carrier and producer of ideology. Various types of gaze converge in it: the male gaze, the white gaze, the military gaze, the human gaze... This is why Beatriz Santiago Muñoz practice means thinking with places, with their differences and particularities, in order not to reproduce the same human and historical logic, for example, like the notion of the exotic, a mindset supported by the tourism industry, constantly reproducing Western colonial imaginaries.Thinking with places, in the plural, is a way of accounting for the diversity of environments. It is also a way of overcoming the misleading binary division between the local and the universal. The material dimension of thinking not only refers to using a body to think, but to practice the thinking through objects. They are invisible agents within the history of thought and at the same time systems of interactions in constant transformation. The enormous production of images of our present makes us think that everything has been represented, that everything is visible. This is not true. What has been over-represented is a partial way of understanding reality, not realities themselves. Therefore, Beatriz proposes the possibility of creating images without spectators or even a cinema without an audience. Working from the margins of representation produces a marginal territory that questions the natural assumption of a center.