In this conversation, designer Carlos J. Soto discusses with artists Sofía Gallisá Muriente and Natalia Lassalle-Morillo their participation in the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship and the exhibition Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial at Cooper Hewitt. During the summer of 2022, Gallisá Muriente worked with objects in the Teodoro Vidal Collection of Puerto Rican History at the National Museum of American History, while Lassalle-Morillo studied Indigenous objects collected by Jesse Walter Fewkes in Puerto Rico housed at the National Museum of Natural History. Together, Gallisá Muriente and Lassalle-Morillo share how these experiences shaped their understanding of repatriation, memory, and the Smithsonian as a home for Puerto Rican cultural heritage.
The Afterlife of Objects
Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Natalia Lassalle-Morillo, and Carlos J. Soto
Sofía Gallisá Muriente and Natalia Lassalle-Morillo, Sofía cradling an Indigenous stone object, 2024; Image by Sofía Gallisá Muriente and Natalia Lassalle-Morillo
CARLOS J. SOTO What struck me most about the research the two of you have been working on is that it contends with “afterlife.” I have had conversations with you both about reverse colonization and the idea of the Puerto Rican diaspora. I grew up in Puerto Rico, but I haven’t been back in a long time. Learning how to reconnect or how to repatriate myself has been a perpetual journey, especially to an island where the word “patria” is so loaded. In many ways, your work is multivalent and has some degree of institutional critique. At the same time, there’s also a poetics happening, or even wordplay with “home” and “housing”—the way objects are stored, conserved, and cared for—or not.
NATALIA LASSALLE-MORILLO I’m drawn to your mention of afterlife. I hadn’t quite thought of it that way, but this idea has made me reconnect with my initial impetus when I began the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship at the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH).
When I first proposed to do research as a fellow, I wanted to think about what happened to Indigenous ritual objects from the Caribbean in the absence of their rightful owner. Spending time in NMNH’s collection storage, it was bizarre to see all these belongings in gavetas, in these drawers, without the warmth of a human being’s presence. What does it mean to preserve something forever and for it to be cold and unused for a hundred years or more, apart from the people, the descendants who are meant to steward its history and be its custodians? When I held these objects, I felt I was connecting with a living being. I thought about the people who had carved them and the people who had believed in them. Where did these stones come from? What meaning did they have for their maker? That information lives in each one of these objects.
SOFÍA GALLISÁ MURIENTE This also reminds me of our conversation with the Puerto Rican archaeologist Reniel Rodríguez Ramos. We were discussing the problem of storage in Puerto Rico for cultural patrimony and of the lack of a national archaeology repository. There are vast logistical problems with Puerto Rico claiming or requesting repatriation. He said something that I thought was very beautiful.
LASSALLE-MORILLO Yes. He said, “Esos objetos son una diáspora que no tiene a dónde regresar,” which translates to, “These objects are a diaspora that have nowhere to return to.” They don’t have a home.
Excerpt from Making Home: Belonging, Memory, and Utopia in the 21st Century, (Cooper Hewitt | The MIT Press, 2025) published in companion with Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial (New York, Nov. 2024-Aug. 2025)
Sofía Gallisá Muriente and Natalia Lassalle-Morillo, Jesse Walter Fewkes’s 1903 map of rivers, bateyes, and sites he excavated in Utuado and present-day Jayuya, Puerto Rico, 2024; Image by Sofía Gallisá Muriente and Natalia Lassalle-Morillo