The Earth That Remains

The work of the artist Firelei Báez is often understood through the lens of geography, notably that of the Caribbean region, and through that region’s ongoing histories of colonization and racialization. Of both Dominican and Haitian heritage, Báez was raised in Dajabón, DR, a mountainous municipality near the border with Haiti, before moving to the United States at the age of eight. Initially, on account of her Caribbean background, as well as art history’s penchant for taxonomical systems, it may seem natural to analyze Báez’s work through the lens of race and geography. To do so, however, is to presuppose the Caribbean as a self-contained, stable physical site and historical formation, when it is, in fact, a spatial construction produced by the West for its own consumption and ongoing exploitation. The Caribbean, as the quintessential “prototype for the modern and postmodern world,” does not have any conventional geographic boundaries. It is fugitive. Through the formal reversals and iconographic affiliations of Báez’s work, as well as its layering of distinct but intersecting histories, the artist reimagines the masculinist, imperialist project that has conspired to produce Caribbean space since the middle of the last millennium. Although she makes use of cartographic sources and titles that index Caribbean space, her work exceeds traditional geographic boundaries to create personal and collective spaces of Black and Brown fugitivity.