Joiri Minaya
My work is a reassertion of Self, an exercise of unlearning, decolonizing and exorcizing imposed histories, cultures and ideas. Challenging both Global North’s capitalist imperialist narrative and Global South’s nationalist patriarchal rhetoric, it counters dangerous equations of women and nature centered in desire and consumption, control and conquest.
The “Tropical,” constructed by colonial desires historically, is now a kind of universal ready-made: decorative, interchangeable, disposable, branding “authenticity” and freshness. Inter-disciplinarily, I explore the performativity of tropical identity as product: entertainment, distraction, pleasure, paradise, fantasy, leisure, service, and the laboring body that maintains it all.
I look back at the Gaze othering me, consuming not only body but also culture, by seeming to fulfill, but instead sabotaging its expectations. I find power in an embodiment that evidences the viewer’s complicity in the construction. I craft the complex, multi-layered, expansive and humanized experience I crave from within this reclaimed position. I internalize, then bring this gaze back out, re-performed, re-arranged, deconstructed, self-evident.
My work is rooted in performance, collage and pattern design, but combines a variety of other mediums and crafts. Recent works (printmaking, transparencies, perforated vinyl, fabric-covered bodies) use opacity and refusal as shelter from demands of hyper-visibility and control.
The Cloaking of the statue of Christopher Columbus behind the Bayfront Park Amphitheatre, Miami, Florida, (2019), dye-sublimation print on spandex fabric and wood structure, 12 x 5 x 5 ft. Photo by Zachary Balber, Courtesy of Fringe Projects Miami.
The Cloaking of the statue Ponce de Leon at the Torch of Friendship on Biscayne Blvd, Miami, Florida, (2019), dye-sublimation print on spandex fabric and wood structure, 7 x 3 x 4 ft. Photo by Zachary Balber, Courtesy of Fringe Projects Miami.
Proposal for artistic intervention on the Columbus statue in front of the Government House in Nassau, The Bahamas.
Joiri Minaya, Containers (documentation of performance at Wave Hill), 2017, variable dimensions. Performer Cristina Alvarez, photographed by Emil Rivera. Text is excerpt from script for the audio recording for Garden II bodysuit.
Joiri Minaya, Containers (documentation of performance at Wave Hill), 2017, variable dimensions. Performer Eilen Itzel Mena, photographed by Emil Rivera. Text is excerpt from script for the audio recording for Camouflage I bodysuit.