Oriana, 2022, 78 mins

A band of militant feminists—mostly close collaborators and acquaintances of Santiago Muñoz—inhabit an undefined space-time of post Hurricane Maria Puerto Rico, in a translation of Monique Wittig’s landmark 1969 feminist novel Les Guérillères. In Wittig’s experimental text, heteronormative gender roles are rejected through a newly created grammar that challenges conventional binary arrangements. Beatriz’s free and procedural reinterpretation of Les Guérillères transposes Wittig’s remarkable linguistic inventions into an equally unconventional filmic structure.

Filled with inexplicable encounters, Oriana unfolds across forests, caves, rivers, and the ruins of industrial and colonial infrastructures. Through frenzied choreographic interludes and silent rituals, this elaborate audiovisual experience charts a world of perceptual distortions and collective processes to map the sensorial unconscious of imagined anti-colonial organising. Everyday objects turn into mysterious assault weapons, while ancestral spirits and the recently deceased hauntingly pervade the filmic space.

Wittig says to name is to take possession, to name is to govern. Oriana thwarts identification, as nameless actors merge with the more-than-human world of the forest and land, forming what Beatriz calls “a plural protagonist” who vitalizes multiplicity until the self disappears in the fantastical, enigmatic and sometimes hallucinatory miasmatic surround of smoke and light, in the otherworldly movements and choreographies of desire. Elfi Turpin, who curated Beatriz’s exhibition at CRAC Alsace, describes this plural protagonist as “a figure that, in order to free itself from the categories of gender, sex and race, is characterized only by each other’s actions and relationships”.

“As in Les Guérillères, the warriors in Oriana are waging a war against patriarchy. There are no protagonists as such, no “character development.” Time moves in many directions. The camera pays attention to the ways in which something happens rather than to what happens. As in the novel, it is drawn to the interval. There is no interiority: no feeling, only doing. The warriors in the film have plenty of everyday work, they smell each other, sleep and receive ambiguous supernatural powers. As a viewer then, we are guided into a filmic space in which we are following a collective and unresolved movement.”

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz

There will a time after the film for questions, and this will have BSL and Live Captions.

Also join Beatriz Santiago Muñoz for an artist talk about her films Oriana and Oenanthe at Glasgow School of Art Friday Event on 15th November.