Sofía Gallisá Muriente, B-Roll, 2017

Sofía Gallisá Muriente: My name is Sofía Gallisá Muriente.

B-Roll is a video I produced using ads and informational videos from Puerto Rico’s Department of Economic Development and the Department of Tourism promoting Puerto Rico as a destination for tourists and foreign investors. It also includes materials that I recorded myself when I more or less infiltrated a meeting of foreign investors who gathered in Puerto Rico. 

The title, B-Roll, comes from a term used in film to describe supporting images: that is, images used to illustrate what is being said, for example, in an interview, or to disguise, hide, or make invisible the cuts between takes in an interview. For me, it seems that it is a term that, in this case, helps me to think about what the images in these videos are doing. And what they do is create a kind of imagery that accompanies the discourse promoting development and tourism.

I was already interested in tourism as a modern mechanism of colonialism before Hurricane Maria. So, even before the hurricane, I had been working on different pieces that talk about how tourism is a force that ends up defining how we narrate history in ways that auto-exoticize us, that simplify, fabricate, replicate—that are self-serving, and that we end up consuming ourselves in Puerto Rico, because they become the dominant forces in the way history is told.