Edin Velez
Brooklyn, NY
Edin Vélez has screened his experimental films extensively at galleries and festivals in New York and throughout Europe, including the 10th Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, in Geneva, Switzerland, The Argos Festival, Brussels, Belgium, The Vancouver International Film Festival, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Videoteca del Sur, Havana, Cuba. His grants and awards include a Rockefeller Fellowship in Media, an ITVS grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship and several grants from the New York State Council on the Arts. He is a full-time faculty member at the Rutgers University School of Visual and Performing Arts in New Jersey. He studied at the University of Puerto Rico.
Delirio Tropical
Edin Velez
Artist BioDelirio Tropical is a 90-minute video set in Puerto Rico in the 1980s. It interweaves the personal, romantic story of a twenty-something Puerto Rican woman with the most controversial political event in recent Puerto Rican history: the 1978 Cerro Maravilla assassinations, two killings that were sponsored and covered up by the FBI. The multi-layered narrative style of the film is inspired by James Joyce’s Ulysses, as well as filmmakers like Marlon Riggs who have both dealt with narrative and redefined formal elements in cinema. This is Velez’s first work to incorporate elements of his Puerto Rican culture and modernist storytelling within a complex formal structure.