WHEN:
May 29 – June 1, 2025
For more information visit the Bartram Garden website.
WHERE:
Bartram's Garden
5400 Lindbergh Boulevard
Philadelphia
A spokesperson describes the event as follows:
“...the commissioned works will reflect on the intertwined legacies of freedom, extraction and ecology in North America's oldest surviving botanical garden. Much like the Venus flytrap, Joiri Minaya's practice often employs beauty -utilizing sensuality, lush florals and hues-to invite deeper reflection on thornier aspects of history and the ongoing impacts of colonialism. Central to the performance series in Venus Flvtrap will be new iterations of Minaya's bodysuits, which she has previously deployed to critique the colonial-era conflation of the Caribbean with the image of a sanitized, idyllic paradise, associations which remain stubbornly pervasive today. More specifically, Minaya uses the bodysuits to examine the performative role that women and their bodies have been made to play in the creation of a commercially palatable set of images that stand in for the complexity of the Caribbean as a whole.
Designed with appropriated fabrics that she sources from the tropical' sections of both online and brick-and-mortar stores, Minaya repurposes these existing prints to effectively critique their production in the first place as images which reflect a commodified aesthetic of the Caribbean. Past suits
have been tailored to contort the body into a single, fixed pose -typically one sourced from imagery found in postcards or tourism advertisements and which position the female body as a site of fantasy and consumption- so that the performer is understood to be physically constrained by the stereotypical images of tropical paradise. In Venus Flytrap, the new bodysuits will differ from these earlier examples not only by allowing the wearer freedom of movement, so that rather than emphasize restriction they will instead facilitate motion, fluidity and change, but also with the patterns Minaya is designing for them. Rather than reflect the stereotypical imagery of 'paradise' or the tropics,' Minaya has referenced botanical illustrations to create specific yet abstract renderings of various plant species that have been historically and culturally significant to Indigenous peoples and those of African descent throughout the Americas..."
