Artists: Beatriz Santiago Muñoz in conversation with Bettina Spörr

Secession Podcast

“Lately, I have been considering how to get out of a structure in which I am forced to make sense. So, I’ve been thinking about the ways in which 20th century Caribbean poetry did a lot of work around nonsense. (…) I guess it’s very dadaist in a way: destroying the order around you, clearing a path so that other kinds of relationships between objects, ideas and places can happen.” Beatriz Santiago Muñoz in an interview with Andreas Petrossiants, published in Frieze, No. 248, 2024

This episode was recorded on 6 December, 2024 in the context of the exhibition:

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
Elogio al disparate
6.12.2024 – 23.2.2025

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz is a firm believer in the transformative potential of the camera to re-imagine and re-signify the world. At the center of her three films shown at the Secession is, of all things, nonsense. The newly produced works that were shot on 16 mm stock and then transferred to video use free association and formal play to build relationships between sound and image that are not to be grasped by “making” rational sense. More

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz is an artist whose expanded moving image work is entangled with Boalian theater, expanded cinema and feminist practices. She tends to work with non-actors, and incorporates improvisation into her process. Her recent work is on the sensorial unconscious of anti-colonial movements and language experiments. Recent solo exhibitions include: Ottilia at Crac-Alsace, Oriana in PIVO, Sao Paulo, and argos in Brussels. She lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Since 2008, Bettina Spörr is a curator at the Secession, where she engages in close collaboration with artists to conceptualise and realise exhibitions that explore the profound impact of contemporary art on society. Throughout her career, she has worked with numerous artists on solo exhibitions and, in 2010, curated the group show where do we go from here? that took up the format of Secession’s ‘Young Scene’ exhibitions, presenting around 30 upcoming artists from Austria and Central Europe.

Secession Podcast: Artists features artists exhibiting at the Secession.
The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast.
Programmed by the board of the Secession.

Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard
Audio Editor: Paul Macheck
Executive Producer: Bettina Spörr