Joiri Minaya’s Tropical-Inflected Critiques of Colonialism

Joiri Minaya’s installation, “Labadee,” makes you feel like you’re entering a wormhole wrapped in the type of patterned spandex that you might see while on vacation; brightly-colored patterns made up of flowers and lush fronds that are as commonly worn on bathing suits as they are seen decking hotel walls. Raised in the Dominican Republic, Minaya refers to her use of this tropical spandex as an act of appropriation — not only of the patterns themselves, but an appropriation of the viewer’s mental connections to the patterns. She relies on the viewer’s associations with the prints to transform the patterned spandex into something subversive; she responded to my questions about her choice of material with one of her own, “How do you represent an expectation of performativity?” Theorist Kobena Mercer has identified this manipulation of Western symbols as a quintessential diasporic strategy that “critically appropriates elements from the master codes of the dominant culture and ‘creolizes’ them, disarticulating given signs and re-articulating their symbolic meaning otherwise.”