La Ruta

2018 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
41:52 minutes

La Ruta by Natalia Lassalle-Morillo follows the Panoramic Route, a now weakened infrastructure that meanders through untouched natural landscapes and off-road destinations on the island of Puerto Rico. The Panoramic Route was designed for residents and tourists to connect with the traditional center of the island, as part of a political agenda to modernize the country through infrastructure and social programs. Today, the highway is notorious for dismal road conditions, resulting in isolation between more densely populated metropolitan areas and contributing to a loss of cultural sites and practices that once took place along the Route. This historical context inspired Lassalle-Morillo to conduct research and ride the Panoramic Route with artists Christopher Gregory and Erika P. Rodriguez. The film, which the group of artists created in collaboration, looks at how residents of towns near the Route define progress and the spaces that conform to it. Based on interviews conducted along the way, La Ruta questions the colony’s romantic vision of progress and comments on the island’s historical and cultural memory.

Natalia Lassalle-Morillo’s films explore familial, neighborly, and citizen relationships in the context of Puerto Rico’s fraught history with the United States and the resulting imperialist oppression that has altered generations of families’ material and spiritual trajectories. Born in Puerto Rico, the artist began realigning her relationship to the island after returning from the USA, delving into the multiplicity of conflicting histories she inherited as a multi-generational Puerto Rican. This sense of home-lessness—not a lack of housing but the feeling of having one’s home made unrecognizable as a product of colonization—manifests in Lassalle-Morillo’s works through multiplicity: many screens, many stories, and many iterations of a single idea that eventually unfold in its natural conclusion. The artist understands filmmaking not as truth telling, but as exploring the medium’s relationship to theater, where every person plays a part in making a story. By bringing the practice of theater into the camera, Lassalle-Morillo presents a filmmaking methodology that creates its own decolonial rhythms, disrupting Western linear notions of time.

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