Sofía Gallisá Muriente

Sofía Gallisá Muriente is a Puerto Rican visual artist working mainly with video, film, photography and text, mining contemporary cultural institutions and historical sites for evidence of contested and/or contradictory narratives. She earned a BFA in Film at New York University (2008) and has participated in experimental pedagogical platforms led by artists, substituting graduate studies with a collaborative process of learning and unlearning. Through multiple approaches to documentation, her work deepens the subjectivity of historical narratives, examining formal and informal archives, popular imaginaries and oral history.In 2011, she co-founded IndigNación, a Spanish-language multimedia collective born out of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and in 2012 she co-founded Restore the Rock, a non-profit hurricane relief organization dedicated to people-powered recovery after Superstorm Sandy.In 2013, she moved back to Puerto Rico as a fellow of Beta-Local’s La Práctica, an artistic research and production program. Here, she deepened her work with video art, self-publishing and installation. In 2015, she was awarded an emerging artist grant from TEOR/éTica in Costa Rica, where she had a solo show titled Buscando La Sombra. She has been a resident artist at Museo La Ene in Argentina (2012), Alice Yard in Trinidad & Tobago (2017), Solar (2017) and Oficina para la Acción Urbana (2018) in Tenerife; as well as a Flaherty Seminar fellow. Her work has been featured in Art in America, Terremoto, Hyperallergic and other publications. She has also shown in the San Juan Polygraphic Triennial; at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires, and more recently at ifa Galerie in Berlin, the Getty’s PST: LA/LA in California and Espacio El Dorado in Colombia.From 2014 to 2020 she served as co-director of Beta-Local, dedicated to fostering knowledge exchange and transdisciplinary practices in Puerto Rico.For Messages for the City: Dreaming ForwardAbout ¿Imaginamos La Libertad?: “My question is a provocation in the context of Puerto Rico, where decolonization and the possibility of independence is a ubiquitous topic of conversation often disregarded for lack of viability. What could independence look like? Do we imagine it enough? How can our imagination lead us to in the process of emancipation? I think these are also questions that are aligned with the work that artists do, which is often to rehearse freedom or imagine what other worlds might be like. I'm interested in both — imagining freedom for my country and developing an art practice that allows me to think and do freely, as I train to be free.”