Between rapid exposures of black and white, a man paces back and forth on an empty beach etching circles in the sand with a disjointed palm frond. The camera attempts hurriedly to trace the shapes before they are washed away by the tide. In Black Beach/Horse/Camp/The Dead/Forces, each item of study becomes another circle in the sand–evidence of something always already there asking to be recognized before it’s too late.

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s work draws largely from Caribbean history and mysticism. Combining portraiture and ritual study, her films challenge the parameters of research outside pedagogues of science or law. Her subject here in Black Beach/Horse/Camp/The Dead/Forces is Vieques, a small island off the coast of Puerto Rico that has been contaminated by heavy metals and toxic chemicals as a result of the U.S. Navy’s use of the area as a bombing range for the past 60 years.

Vieques is one of the most highly contaminated sites in the world with one of the highest illness rates in the Caribbean region.[1] For the past decade, inhabitants of the island have struggled to receive proper acknowledgement and treatment from the U.S. government due to a lack of “causal evidence” linking pollution to higher percentages of cancer, autoimmune disorders, damaged nervous systems, and birth defects.[2] The acceptance of evidence, produced and readied many times over, remains impossible in the face of a government that controls the land and people afflicted. Where does the healing process begin within a framework that’s not yours? Can one make sense of trauma without reifying the same facts refused as truth?

Santiago Muñoz searches for the evidence beyond plain fact. Through her camera’s side-long glance, she allows mysticism and causal evidence to come face-to-face. In a quick succession of close-ups, Santiago Muñoz frames a horse standing in the sand and an older man presumed to be its caretaker, both of whom meet the camera’s gaze with equal gravity. Black and white film cuts back and forth from each living subject to surrounding dense forest and black magnetite sand, creating an image of life both historical and synchronous.

In breaks from Santiago Muñoz’s erratic camera movements, she meditates on images of intergenerational trauma and longing through portraiture. Two children tout a plastic skeleton below the horizon line, one of the most contaminated shorelines in the world, acknowledging the camera before beginning to play with one another again. The following scene settles on the face of an older woman with a small painted circle on her forehead, seen earlier lying on the forest floor. One recognizes from Santiago Muñoz’s description of the film that the woman pictured has worked to protect a sacred tree on the island, overcoming illness many times over during her fight. Unchanged, she stares directly into the camera’s gaze until the film’s end.

No voice or guiding action creates the infrastructure to understand each story in Black Beach/Horse/Camp/The Dead/Forces. Instead, each visual examination is accompanied by the notable constant of silence. The rise and fall of waves on a black sand beach is as loud or as quiet as the sacred tree’s protector; horses weak and old with age are as innocent as two small children playing joyfully together in the shallow of the ocean. In the absence of noise, Santiago Muñoz refigures the silence surrounding the island, pulling together signs of life and spirit for healing in place of suffering.

Ehm West 05.15.2020