Supported by the 2019 Creative Capital Award, Kathryn Ramey’s Signo Vacío / The Empty Sign premieres at Anthology Film Archive, New York, NY, May 8–10, 2026.

Kathryn Ramey’s (2019 Creative Capital Awardee) El Signo Vacío / The Empty Sign is a feature-length anthropological journey through the U.S. occupation of Puerto Rico. Mixing over 100 years of found footage — tourism, agricultural, and propaganda films — with contemporary portraits of local artists and activists and Puerto Rican punk rock/noise music, the film reveals how carefully crafted American fictions of “democracy” and “debt” obscure a capitalist and military domination that is ongoing. 

Moving between old and new, Spanish and English, and between paradise and environmental destruction, El Signo Vacío becomes a “re-educational” film challenging the viewer to (re)think modern colonization, its mechanisms and its responsibilities.