Marché Salomon

2015 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

16:00 minutes

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz

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Marché Salomon by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz depicts two meat vendors, a young man and woman, chatting in Marché Salomon, a busy Port-au-Prince market. Amongst the surrounding bustle, the two have an unsentimental discussion about the mystical qualities of common products sold at the market, wondering whether the divine can inhabit any kind of object—mass produced bottles, toxic rivers, beheaded goats. Their musings weave together the cosmic and the mundane, with the work of butchering a goat and the characters of the market serving as existential metaphors for the universe, time travel, ghosts, and death. The young man observes, “The meat sellers, they are the sun, each time they cut a piece of meat, energy flies around the universe. With all of the flies, the women, all of the vegetables, they are the planets.” One might understand the film as a series of open-ended questions: What things and places do we consider sacred? Who dictates our understanding of the universe? Might we be able to uncover the seemingly unreachable distance of the cosmos in the banality of everyday life? As in her other works, Marché Salomon seamlessly blends documentary and cinematic styles to convey the deep tension that exists between the mythologized history of a colonized land and the seemingly innocuous passing of time in the present, ultimately conveying a haunting unease.

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Beatriz Santiago Muñoz lives and works in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her approach to making films and videos resembles the careful approach of an ethnographer. She learns about the place, the site of the film, its cultural histories and local mythologies. She learns about the people who are both subject and actors. She invites them to participating through enacting their own life, or an aspect of their cultural history. They trace the contours of cultural memory, and frame political and social issues. Her work combines documentary record, indigenous historical memory, participatory inflections, chance discovery, and fictional explorations.

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Colors:

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• culture.n.01
• commodity.n.01
• colonialism.n.01
• time.n.03
• travel.n.01
• puerto rican