Beatriz Santiago works predominantly in film and video, and her works often explore minor and unofficial, forgotten or intimate narratives and histories, of places and events. She often collaborates with non-actors who dramatize these narratives according to their personal perspectives. Santiago’s work privileges personal and individual histories over collective or official narratives and, in the process, undermines the notion of history and its modes of representation.

On this occasion, Santiago’s works address issues related to the idea of utopia. Inventario, 2006, portrays an indigenous community in the frontier between Mexico and Guatemala, its members narrate the present and past history of their settlement and the progressive “urbanization” of their tropical forest habitat. The short 16mm films will be presented one at a time throughout the duration of the exhibition (5 months). The first will be Davide Segre, 2007, from a trilogy of short films (the other two are Pyotr, 2007 and Carlo Vivaldi, 2007) inspired by Elsa Morante’s novel History, which recounts the experience of WWII in Italy through the lives of a small Roman family. Exploring the transformations of one of its characters, the Jew Davide Segre –who reveals himself at first as Carlo Vivaldi, a pacifist anarchist, and then as Pyotr, a partisan, member of the armed resistance against the Nazi occupation), Santiago explores the complexities of war and the utopian and dystopian motivations that often accompany it. The last short film, titled Medidas (Falansterio), 2007, penetrates into the first low income housing project built in Puerto Rico, the Falansterio located in the vicinity of Puerta de Tierra, and with the collaboration of its inhabitants the artist examines the incidence of this type of architecture in the everyday lives of the people who dwell within it.