Interview: Demystifying the Caribbean Paradise with Patricia Encarnacion

Patricia Encarnacion is an Afro-Caribbean multidisciplinary artist, activist and scholar living in the Bronx, New York. The pillar underpinning the ideologies behind her work is the desire to tell untold stories of the Caribbean, a region that has been reduced to a space incapable of producing knowledge while serving as a vacation destination. Encarnacion aims to portray a discourse that encourages bridge-building for the Caribbean diasporic community, and the Dominican one in particular. She uses the aesthetics of everyday Caribbean objects, landscapes and bodies as a visual vehicle to create her images and to further dismantle biased histories and imposed social roles. We were delighted to speak with Patricia to delve into her artistic practice for the latest series of Caribeart interviews.

C – El Negro Detrás de la Oreja (The Black Behind the Ear) is a powerful series in which you created porcelain pieces that highlight the influence of the colonial narrative on Caribbean culture, despite its African and Taíno roots. What was your thought process and contextual research behind this series?

P – This series began with the feeling that the poem “El Negro Detrás de la Orjea” by Juan Antonio Alix stirred in me when I first read it. With his Décima (a poetic verse form), this Dominican poet scolds his people for their eagerness to fervently deny their African, Black roots. I was struck by how relevant this 19th-century poem still was, and in 2014 I decided to begin this series with ceramics and porcelain, since it is a material that the three main ethnic groups underpinning Dominican culture used. I seek to show how these colonial narratives still affect the everyday behavior of my people. And even though most of our daily life is influenced by our African and Taíno heritage, we insist on acknowledging only our European roots. Language and everyday objects are my vehicles for connecting with my audience. I contextualize these elements to invite reflection on these colonial behaviors and, at the same time, to celebrate the beautiful heritage (languages, aesthetics, habits, etc.) that our ancestors left us.

As a curatorial practice, it is essential to present and preserve Caribbean culture and artists in order to inform our contemporaries and future generations.

C – You explore issues that concern the entire Caribbean region because of our shared colonial history and our intersectional, silenced experiences that carry violent stigmas. Can you tell us how your activism began, where you see it heading, and how your work has been received?

P – My activism began very early in my life. It (unfortunately) began as a form of rejection of, and dissociation from, my own culture, without realizing that my culture and the hegemonic practices perpetrated by the Dominican State and the Global North were two distinct things. Once I separated these two things, the State and my identity, I was able to steer my activism toward celebrating Caribbean culture and tackling the systemic oppressions (racism, misogyny, emigration, etc.) that had initially made me reject the culture and even myself. Self-decolonization is a process of evolution and growth that demands constant work. Little by little, I continue to enrich my anticolonial vocabulary and practice, which is the pillar that supports, and will continue to support, my activism and my work.

C – “I am From Where You Vacation” is a breathtaking series that challenges the dominant perception of the Caribbean as a “Paradise” and its exoticization. What prompted you to create this body of work? Where do you find the materials for your collages? Who do you collaborate with for your photographs?

P – Thank you again for reaching out to me and for describing my work this way; it humbles me. “I am From Where You Vacation” is a series that stems from my series “Tropical Limerencia,” in which I work on the idea of obsessive love (or the poor practice of loving) from one group of people and individuals toward others. In the course of this analysis, I realized that these acts of “Limerence” (obsession) play out in similar ways from one region to another. I linked this line of thought to the idea that the Caribbean is a “paradise” and to the way the tourism industry exploits that narrative. At the same time, it is a rhetoric promoted by the Northern world to confine the Caribbean region to a mere vacation spot, positioning locals as disposable bodies in the background of their paradisiacal experience.

P – This series wants to center and empower the bodies that inhabit these spaces through surreal (and sometimes absurd) landscapes, and to show the polarized experiences that can be lived in the Caribbean depending on the individual. I keep an archive of images I find on the internet of gateway campaigns and of the way the Caribbean is depicted when it is searched online. I arrange them the way a Caribbean person might create these campaigns (from their own point of view).

P – These compositions were initially intended to serve as storyboards for a series of videos that I would like to make one day. In the end, this series criticizes local elites and the kind of tourism practiced in the Dominican Republic, which limits locals’ access to their own land. At the same time, I explore my experience of how I had to become an immigrant to afford entry into these spaces, acknowledging my privilege while exposing how I will never be welcomed (or treated) in the same way as a (white) foreigner.

My work is the counterpart of the everyday, in which I use the Caribbean aesthetics I grew up with as my main visual language to dissect, understand and stay in constant contact with my identity. As a Dominican and a woman of color, I decode the prejudices constructed by society by questioning, analyzing and openly exposing their origins, which allows my discourse to transcend the merely political and become anthropological and humanist. Through these practices, I have concluded that my need to research the “unknown” historical and psychological context of my identity is rooted in the nuances of tropical aesthetics, decolonization and the dismantling of imposed social roles and history. As an interdisciplinary artist and designer, I explore these concepts through various media such as ceramics, photography and video. This gives me the opportunity to explore different points of view on everyday objects, nature, bodies and artifacts of the Caribbean. – Patricia Encarnacion