Presents: Glorimar Marrero-Sánchez
Art and Cinema: Aesthetics Acts as Rebellion
Wednesday, March 25 | 4:45 – 6:00 pm, Cole Cinema, Campus Center
In this presentation, Glorimar Marrero-Sánchez reflects on language as a site of rebellion in her cinematic and artistic practice, drawing primarily on her debut feature film, La Pecera/The Fishbowl, and ongoing research-based projects. Rooted in Puerto Rico and the broader Caribbean, her work emerges from a colonial context where bodies, territories, and narratives are routinely silenced, displaced, or rendered disposable.
La Pecera operates through a deliberate tension among spoken language, silence, and the body's expressive capacities. Against dominant narratives of resilience and productivity imposed on sick, feminized, and colonized bodies, the film mobilizes refusal, of translation, of narrative closure, and of linguistic legibility, as an ethical and political stance. Glorimar Marrero-Sánchez examines how Spanish, silence, gesture, and sound function not merely as representational tools but as modes of resistance that speak back to medical, colonial, and extractivist regimes of power.
Extending beyond the film, the talk situates language across her interdisciplinary practice, encompassing cinema, video installation, photography, and archival work, as unstable and contested terrain. She will discuss current projects and approaches to language and aesthetics. Drawing on feminist, decolonial, and Caribbean thought, she considers how speaking back can take the form of fragmentation, as well as of embodied presence, particularly for women and queer subjects navigating illness, ecological violence, and territorial precarity.
Ultimately, this presentation approaches language as an effective and insurgent force, one through which marginalized bodies and territories speak, endure, and reshape the conditions under which their lives are seen and heard.
Glorimar Marrero Sánchez is a Puerto Rican filmmaker, writer-director, and interdisciplinary artist. Her work as a director and screenwriter spans fiction, documentary, and hybrid cinema, as well as audiovisual installation and photography. Her practice is rooted in a feminist and decolonial aesthetic, exploring themes such as colonial violence, environmental degradation, memory, and resistance, with a particular focus on Afro-Caribbean and Puerto Rican experiences.
Her debut feature film, La Pecera (The Fishbowl), premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and became the first Puerto Rican film nominated for the Goya Award for Best Ibero-American Film (2024). The film received numerous international accolades, including Best Film at the Cyprus Film Days and the Grand Jury Prize at the Seattle International Film Festival. It was also nominated for Best Latin American Film at the Forqué Awards and received two nominations at the Platino Awards.
THIS YEAR’S THEME – Speaking Back: Language as Rebellion.
The WGSX Colloquium (March 25–26, 2026) centers on “Speaking Back: Language as Rebellion,” examining the power of language—understood broadly as speech, narrative, embodiment, symbolism, aesthetics, and cultural practice—as a catalyst for social change. The colloquium explores how language in its many forms shapes and reinforces gendered identities, cultural norms, and social hierarchies, while also highlighting how women and gender-diverse individuals strategically “speak back” to systems that marginalize or silence them.
Through critical dialogue and the sharing of scholarly, activist, and artistic perspectives, the event interrogates language’s dual role as both a tool of oppression and a powerful site of resistance, celebrating the creative ways communities reimagine meaning-making in their ongoing struggles for equity, justice, and freedom.
Sponsor(s)
WGSX, Argelia Gonzalez Hurtado