In an artist statement on her website, multidisciplinary artist Joiri Minaya describes her work as a “reassertion of Self, and an exercise of unlearning, decolonizing, and exorcizing imposed histories.” Born in New York City and raised in the Dominican Republic, Minaya seeks to sabotage the gaze and regain agency through her work in performance, installation, sculpture, and photography. In her ongoing series Cloaking (2019–), Minaya covers colonialist, figural statues in vibrant, tropical fabric. The bodies of monumentalized men such as Juan Ponce de León and Christopher Columbus become less recognizable when bound in body bags that beckon closer historical looking.
In shrouding monumental figures, Minaya unveils the obscuring function of monuments with their insistence on the last word and erasure of other kinds of historical narratives and perspectives. She instead puts on the pedestal the histories, colors, and materiality that monuments usually deny. The uncertainty of the veiled body in her work subverts the concise and uncomplicated narrative traditionally asserted by the monumental figure. When her installations conclude and the fabrics come down, what is newly revealed?
—Emily Alesandrini
Emily Alesandrini
If you could make your ongoing Cloaking interventions permanent, would you? What is your hope for these monuments when your work is deinstalled?
Joiri Minaya
I would welcome the opportunity to work with more long-lasting materials, because the way the interventions have occurred so far has been ephemeral. Yet these conversations have been going on for years, and changes are slow. With Cloaking, I hope to draw attention to these statues occupying public space and question them, proposing alternative discourses and stories that were silenced or undermined by the system these statues celebrate. By the time each intervention is deinstalled, I hope to have made a contribution to the questioning and discussion of the presence and meaning of this symbol in a public space. But they come up and down so quickly! I’ve enjoyed working with a material like spandex in all the connotations and relations that it evokes, especially how it seems to queer and subvert the bronze figures’ male, dominant, imperial, macho pose. The temporary nature of the material proposes a counterargument around monuments. But my use of fabric in this manner stemmed out of limitations (budget, permits, the difficulty of navigating bureaucratic systems). In spite of the challenges posed by working with bronze or stone, which have a loaded history, I’d love to see what would happen if given the opportunity to work with lasting materials like that. Or to think of other materials, interpretations, or proposals around the idea of something “permanent.” In any case, I’d love to see what my work would look like if it had a longer presence in public space. Permanence might be just an ideal: in reality, things are always changing. Part of the issues my series responds to is precisely the insistence of ideals from the past wanting to remain dominant in spite of a changing world.
