Firelei Báez
b. 1981; Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic
Untitled (Tabula Anemographica seu Pyxis Navtic), 2021
Acrylic and oil on printed canvas
In Firelei Báez's painting Untitled (Tabula Anemographica seu Pyxis Navtic) a furry brown body erupts from the center of the composition, decorated with an Afro-Brazilian penca de balangandã amulet around her waist and an assortment of flowers, beaded headdresses, and cowrie shells. A trickster creature from Dominican folklore with roots in Taíno mythology, the ciguapa is superimposed atop a barely visible old cartographic document: one of the earliest and most significant wind rose charts (or anemographs) from the seventeenth century. Functional navigational tools at one point in history, charts like this one trafficked in stereotypes; each wind was personified using a head of a figure bearing the racial characteristics associated with the region or direction represented. The ciguapa, however, rejects these Western methods of pictorializing knowledge by asserting her larger-than-life body as the originator of a new mapping system for a fictional alternative universe.
