The Cloakings

Joiri Minaya (b. 1990, New York, United States; based in New York)
"The Cloakings" 2017/2019
Photo documentation and postcards
Courtesy of the artist

Tropical prints and patterned fabrics have long been part of Joiri Minaya’s critical toolbox, having incorporated these materials in her work via photographs, performances, and installations. For some of those pieces, she would cover herself or others with a full bodysuit that simultaneously would make the wearer extremely noticeable and conceal them in a critique of exotification and otherness in relation to nature.

The Cloakings is a series of digital and real coverings for public monuments that represent colonial legacies. The specific interventions realized so far include a digital rendering of a Christopher Columbus statue located in Nassau, Bahamas; and the actual wrapping of another Columbus monument as well a statue of Juan Ponce de León in Miami, Florida. In the case of the latter two, these tropical print coverings were specifically designed as metaphors of resistance, incorporating plants used in Native American, Black and Afro-Caribbean rituals that reference poison healing, purging, cleansing, casting evil spirits away or protection, as well as the very plant that poisoned Ponce de León.

Through this process, Minaya resignifies her own work in order to create a statement on public space and national identity in relation, but not limited to, touristic and commemorative sites. The massive worldwide movement in defense of Black lives that took center stage during the Summer of 2020 demands a more just, decolonized future, and has consistently critiqued the reasons for keeping such monuments. By intervening on the statues, Minaya makes them hyper-visible and calls into question their place in our cities, and their ideological repercussions in our societies and our minds.

By Marina Reyes Franco (based in San Juan, Puerto Rico)