In 1969, French feminist writer Monique Wittig (1935-2003) published Les Guérillères, an experimental novel that challenges the binary narratives that impose limits on gender definitions. Written in the political context of May 68, of the women’s liberation movements, and decolonial struggles, Wittig created a feminist epic poem that urges women to destroy the patriarchy and the language that perpetuates the historical and material oppression of women. The book is considered a revolutionary source for feminist thought in its critique of heterosexual normativity and patriarchal rules. Wittig exposes the political uses of biological discriminations in establishing a gender system, claiming that the term ‘women’ is defined by men, thus the sex-class system must be abolished for new formulations of gender to emerge. It is through this radical transformation that women will become speaking/naming subjects, freed from the categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman.’ In the book, the pronoun Elles appears as an enigmatic plural entity, a collective female protagonist and army of warriors that lead a violent struggle against patriarchal domination. Their militant action subverts traditional expectations of gender roles rendering obsolete the idea of an immutable feminine essence.

Inspired by Wittig’s Les Guérrillères, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz feature length film – Oriana – is a personal and idiosyncratic adaptation of the book, reinterpreted by the artist in the context of the island of Puerto Rico. Exploring the ways in which speech is manifested in the body, and how it reflects deep-rooted connections to political and economic processes, the film is less about storytelling and more about language and sensorial reality, says Santiago Muñoz. The first iteration of Oriana was presented in 2021 at Pivô, São Paulo (co-produced with the 34th São Paulo Biennial), splitting the film into seven projections across the exhibition space, with an original soundtrack composed by Brazilian band Rakta, and shown alongside masks and objects that reappear throughout the film. As pointed out by Fernanda Brenner, the curator of the show, Santiago Muñoz filmography “intersperses the documental with the fictional and is on its own an invitation to de-automatize a way of seeing and being in a world created and supported by Eurocentric narratives of progress and development.”

Santiago Muñoz’s poetic translation from text to moving image seeks to echo Wittig’s experimentation with language. Developed in close collaboration with a group of performers and feminist activists, the camera follows these women as they wander through tropical forests, rivers, caves, and shelters, engaging in collective rituals, strategies of survival and acts of care. In an undetermined time and space, the structure of the film blends scripted and improvised scenes, from burial myths to river baths. At times luminous, at times dark, the visual, sonic and tactile qualities embedded in the artist’s cinematic landscape point to the interdependencies between human and non-humans. In a territory scarred by colonial violence and extractivist practices, Santiago Muñoz creates an eco-temporality that acknowledges our interdependency with the earth systems, interweaving the process of shooting with a concern for the ethics of social and environmental justice. As Donna Haraway has noted, “If there is to be multispecies ecojustice, which can also embrace diverse human people, it is high time that feminists exercise leadership in imagination, theory, and action to unravel the ties of both genealogy and kin, and kin and species.”

In the opening sequence of Oriana, a hand holding a brush draws a red circle on a woman’s body, using plant pigment. The sound of birds and the presence of an exuberant flora situate the viewer in the tropical landscape of the Caribbean. Then, a few minutes later, the image shifts to a close-up of a mouth; the lens tracks the mouth’s movement trying to utter words, as if words are struggling to find a way through the lungs and the throat, into the world. Santiago Muñoz says she “makes film with the sites.” These shots foreground the formal qualities of the film’s fragmented non-narrative structure, where indigenous cosmologies and non-Eurocentric worldviews prevail. Santiago Muñoz camera breaks linear time in search of an eco-feminist language that is formulated not by a singular body but in the web of relations between human and non-human entities, beyond the nature-culture divide.

Borrowing words from the book’s final chapter, a voice-over in the film tells the viewer: “Elles disent qu’il faut brûler tous les livres et ne garder de chacun d’eux que ce qui peut les présenter à leur avantage dans un âge futur” (…) Elles disent qu’en premier lieu le vocabulaire de toutes les langues est à examiner, à modifier, à bouleverser de fond en comble, que chaque mot doit être passé au crible.” Through the emancipatory potential of language, communal life, political struggle and solidarity, Oriana tries to unearth a radical understanding of gender rooted in a shared vocabulary that sets the conditions for a new beginning.