Joiri Minaya Challenges the Allure of Exoticization

PHILADELPHIA — In a bucolic corner of the Schuylkill River in southwest Philadelphia sits the oldest continuously operating botanical garden in North America. Bartram’s Garden, named after its founder, botanist John Bartram (1699–1777), is the site of many continental firsts, including being home to the oldest ginkgo tree in North America. But its history, as part of the larger project of the colonization of the Americas, is never far from the surface. New species were introduced to local ecologies at gardens such as this one, mimicking how colonial societies funneled in new populations to compete with or even supplant established ones.

That tension between familiar and foreign feels central to artist Joiri Minaya’s “Venus Flytrap.” Performers are symbolically “planted” in front of the audience, frozen, wearing uniform bodysuits with a plantain-influenced design, which they eventually peel off to reveal more vibrant floral patterns. Certain markers of identity, such as skin color, are subsumed by the suits, offering one solution to the dilemma of visibility critic Seph Rodney pointed out in his review of Minaya’s work back in 2018:

> One of the most profound dilemmas that comes into play when one is an immigrant to a place where one is relentlessly, reflexively made the other, hinges on the question of visibility. On one hand, to be rendered invisible is to be made into that abstracted percentage of the minority and thereby not counted, not countenanced, not considered, made inconsequential. On the other hand to be configured in the gaze of the dominant class/gender/race as glaringly and unforgivably different, exceptional, exotic is to also have one’s agency (that is, the ability to enact one’s will on the world) corralled in other ways.

That play with visibility in Minaya’s work is a complicated metaphor for belonging and selfhood. Though markers like race and class have been obfuscated, the artist toys with our ingrained expectations by evoking what is seen as traditional femininity, including hair flips and hands on the hip. In this way, she offers us glimpses behind the curtain without shedding the mystery that propels the forms into our imagination.

Minaya is a New York-based artist who was raised in the Dominican Republic, and during the last decade, she’s made an impact on contemporary art through images that probe migration, colonization, and stereotypes, often through strong contrasting patterns and fabric bodysuits. “Venus Flytrap” is the first time Minaya collaborated formally with a choreographer (Jonathan González); in it, the body — so central to her previous work, particularly her Containers series — comes to life via the layering of floral ornament of both native species and those brought from Africa upon it. This reflects Bartram’s Garden’s evolution from its starkly colonial origins to a hub for a different type of cultural cross-pollination. Today, it also houses the Sankofa Community Farm, which seeks to promote self-reliance using the tools of the African diasporic culture of the region, making it a site well-suited for complicating established botanical histories.

During the roughly 30-minute performance, layers of that initial feeling of strangeness elicited by those frozen uniformed figures peel away as performers appear to relax into more familiar actions, even mimicking the behavior of park-goers through vignettes that span the field, sometimes amid the audience. One performer barked like a dog; a couple frolicked through the seated onlookers; others seemed to float through or lounge across the space. By the end, figures loosen their bodies, collapsing onto the grass, striking exaggerated poses, and hugging trees, among other actions. The latter part of the performance is meant to evoke the sorrel plant with the introduction of a festive atmosphere. Sorrel is the base of a popular red drink in the Caribbean that has also been incorporated into Juneteenth celebrations in the United States, where it is seen as a symbol of blood and the resilience of enslaved people. From the posed elegance that starts the performance, “Venus Flytrap” grows into a carnivalesque frolic that ends with the performers receding into a large tree surrounded by sail-like colorful printed fabrics that the artists created at the city’s Fabric Workshop and Museum.

Curator Dessane Lopez Cassell, a former reviews editor at Hyperallergic, shares a Dominican heritage with the artist and told me that they were also considering the way settlers often remade the Caribbean in their own image.

“This is a project that has evolved from the Containers series that Joiri completed a couple of years ago, where she was really thinking of the legacy of tourism and how that is informed by colonialism, essentially that a lot of settlers remade the Caribbean in their image, and the way in which we have these