Visite guidée

Alba Jaramillo’s film opens with a strange scene that shows horses walking through a residential neighbourhood. In the next shot, a red-tinted night scene, a loudspeaker welcomes visitors and reminds them that access to the contaminated areas of Zuania is prohibited. In fact, this island in the Puerto Rico archipelago, a US territory, long served as a military testing ground for the United States before being abandoned. But the GIs have given way to tourists, and Beatriz accompanies them on “guided tours” through the island’s mangrove reserve and, at times, like a Creole “Stalker,” even into the infamous “zone”, in order to pay the mortgage installments on her house. Drawing on the conventions of science fiction, fable and investigative journalism, the filmmaker juxtaposes the voice-overs of the island’s inhabitants and images of aggressive real estate speculation to explore the political subjugation of this Caribbean island, where wild horses – transported in the holds of the Spanish coloniser’s ships – proliferate as phantasmagorical reincarnations of perpetual dispossession.

Emmanuel Chicon

Motorrodillo, 2022
Remate Especial, 2015
Project for a Collection, 2014