Artists Natalia Lassalle-Morillo and Sofía Gallisá Muriente gather testimonies and imaginaries of Puerto Ricans who migrated to Central Florida following 2017’s Hurricane Maria. This immersive, four-channel video installation layers fictional and non-fictional narratives, speculating about how community is created anew. The title, Foreign in a Domestic Sense, comes from the 1901 Supreme Court case in which a justice described the island nation as “unincorporated territory” of the U.S.

Natalia Lassalle Morillo and Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Foreign in a Domestic Sense, 2021, stills from four-channel video, 32m. Image courtesy of the artists.

Sofía Gallisá Muriente and Natalia Lassalle-Morillo are visual artists based in San Juan, Puerto Rico, who have been collaborating since 2019 on research-based moving image projects. Their 4-channel film Foreign in a Domestic Sense (2021) connects the testimonies and imaginaries of Puerto Ricans who migrated to Central Florida following political and environmental disasters. Unruly Subjects (2024) engages with Puerto Rican collections housed at the Smithsonian, examining their histories of accession into the imperial archive while mediating forms of return to the people and places they belong to. The work was featured in the 2024 Vera List Center Forum and the Smithsonian Design Triennial. Natalia and Sofía have been Smithsonian Artist Research Fellows and residents at Headlands Center for the Arts, while also continuing to develop their individual practices. Their work has been exhibited at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, Dazibao (Montréal), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taiwan, Third Horizon, BlackStar, El Kilómetro, and the Flaherty Seminar.