The Performative Interventions of Beatriz Cortez, Sebastian Hernandez, and Joiri Minaya

By Joseph Daniel Valencia

When I think about the exhibition one never remembers alone, my mind often goes to artists Sebastian Hernandez, Beatriz Cortez, and Joiri Minaya, whose works on view formed captivating sonic and visual invitations into the exhibition space. Hernandez’s dynamic eight-foot-wide video installation dominated the gallery’s entrance, while Cortez’s quieter door sculpture (part of a larger installation) and Minaya’s video piece often lured visitors further inside. Since mounting the exhibition, I have been reflecting on the power of these works--how each artist tapped into their bodies to produce critical interventions into personal and collective memory.

In their video BROWN ZERO (2016), Sebastian Hernandez can be seen performing underneath the Fourth Street Bridge (coincidently located near the Los Angeles Arts District where this exhibition was held). Their brown body adorned in traditional danza Azteca attire, they spring into the air and dance across an earthen floor. Lasers, fire sparks, and footage of collapsing buildings emerge through superimposed and slowed-down digital layers, converting Hernandez’s once serene performance into a potentially violent and precarious scene.

Riffing off “ground zero,” a phrase evoking a site of detonation and loss, BROWN ZERO meditates on the histories of violence experienced by indigenous peoples of the Americas from the colonial period to the present. The work asks: what has been lost or erased through colonization and through the numerous attempts to eradicate indigenous populations? And how do the inheritors of these systemic violences process and heal from these legacies? For black and brown people in the Americas, the violence of ancestral trauma lives in our blood, in our DNA, and it continues to manifest and impact us today.

For Hernandez, performance provides a vehicle for connecting to the past while also addressing the challenges of the present moment. As the video continues, Hernandez dances through the lasers, and through the fire, despite their circumstances. Through the ritual of dance, they embody the spirit of resiliency passed down and preserved through generations, and as they continue to perform, they enact forms of inherited memory and history, to chart a path forward.

The body is also the medium of choice for Joiri Minaya. In her video Siboney (2014), the artist spends hours producing a large-scale mural of a tropical landscape only to destroy it. Minaya mixes her own pigments and meticulously renders a brilliant scarlet and cerulean flower pattern across one of the walls of the Centro León in Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic. While the paint is still wet, Minaya runs into the mural, dragging her body over it, and leaving it ruined. 

As an artist with Dominican roots, Minaya problematizes the notion of a picture-perfect tropical paradise and provides a gripping social critique: Who gets to experience paradise in the Caribbean? And who has been bound by it, literally, but also socially, politically, and economically? This line of inquiry has persisted throughout Minaya’s artistic practice. 

In a later photographic work, Container (2015), Minaya wraps herself in a spandex encasing surrounded by lush green leaves. The stretched fabric and vibrant greenery suffocate her and speak to histories exploitation of African diasporic peoples through colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. Minaya employs this tropical encasing once more in The Cloaking… (2019), a public intervention in which she enshrouds a Christopher Columbus statue near the Bayfront Park Amphitheatre in Miami, directly challenging the figure’s celebration and canonization as a brave and curious discoverer of the New World.

Minaya’s works serve as cathartic releases and interventions into the public and historical record. Through these works, she speaks to African diasporic people, past and present, who have put their lives and bodies on the line to build and maintain the empires of this hemisphere. Her interventions confront these legacies, while simultaneously challenging viewers to consider how they may have been complicit.

Another artist in the exhibition, Beatriz Cortez, confronts legacies of war and forced migration in Central America. In her three-piece installation, Cortez looks inward to extract memories of her upbringing in San Salvador, El Salvador. The artist fled her hometown at the age of eighteen during the violent, twelve-year Salvadoran Civil War, which incited terror on government officials, clergy members, academics, and civilians. 

For survivors of war, there is a violence to memory, to remembering, and at times it might be easier to try to forget. Nevertheless, Cortez remembers the killings, the disappearances, and human rights violations of her war-torn country, and draws upon these memories to create stunning works. Her video installation, Childhood Bedroom (2012-2017), recreates the room where she was raised and features posters of Archbishop Óscar Romero, a leader of the Salvadoran Catholic Church and vocal critic of the violence of the armed forces, right-wing groups, and leftist guerrillas involved in El Salvador’s civil conflict. Despite Romero’s role as a beacon of hope for many, Cortez could have never had these posters in her room during the war for fear of persecution. Thus, Cortez’s intervention into her own memory of her bedroom serves as a commemorative act of resistance. 

The Couch of Memory (2019) brings to life the couch Cortez’s parents purchased as young immigrants in New York and kept when they returned to El Salvador, holding the memories of the family’s time in both locations. Cortez’s reproduction of the ordinary couch, fabricated in unfinished steel, also preserves traces of those who touch it, serving as an archive of memory for the exhibition.

Adjacent to these works is Cortez’s The Door (2012) a self-made portal installed between two walls and constructed from fragmented pieces of wood to allow only a glimpse into the domestic interior. Underscoring the potential fragmentation of our own memories, this wall also sealed off the installation from other elements of the exhibition, creating a room of intimate memories, and also of memory sharing.

For black and brown people in the Americas, there is no doubt that the violences of colonialism, slavery, and war have shaped our world as we know it. As Cortez, Hernandez, and Minaya confront these legacies in their work—and as they highlight, challenge, and critique structures of power on a deeply personal level—they show us that we too are powerful and, through art, we can heal.

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“Saint Óscar Romero.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, March 20, 2020, accessed April 20, 2020; available online: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Oscar-Arnulfo-Romero.