Whitney Biennial 2019
May 17–Oct 27, 2019
Sofía Gallisá Muriente
25
Floor 5
Born 1986 in San Juan, PR
Lives in San Juan, PR
On four occasions in the 1950s the mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, Felisa Rincón de Gautier, arranged for snow to be flown from the Northeastern U.S. to Puerto Rico in celebration of Three Kings Day (Epiphany). In her video Lluvia con Nieve (Rain with Snow), Sofía Gallisá Muriente stretches the only remaining footage of this event—a forty-second Paramount News clip from 1955—into a video of about fourteen minutes. Her manipulated version of the archival footage, running underneath a soundtrack of the titular mambo by Mon Rivera (Efrain Rivera Castillo), depicts the arrival of the snow and a crowd enthusiastically playing in it before it quickly turns to mud. In this work Gallisá Muriente examines Puerto Rico’s colonial history, employing this intervention in the island’s tropical climate as a metaphor for relations between Puerto Rico and the United States.
Lluvia con nieve/Rain with snow, 2014
Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Lluvia con nieve/Rain with snow, 2014. Two-channel video, black-and-white, sound, 13:32 min. Image courtesy the artist