Joiri Minaya

Redecode: A tropical theme is a great way to create a fresh, peaceful, relaxing atmosphere is a work by Dominican artist Joiri Minaya. In it, a wallpaper depicting pixelated banana plants decorates the wall of a room. Taking as a starting point the wallpaper used in the Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia and the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles—two classic luxury hotels of the 1940s and 1950s in the United States—, Minaya recreates a decorative space to disrupt its reading. In Redecode, the digital character of the image is clear due to the accentuation of its pixels and it uses the characteristic camouflage colors of US military uniforms to allude to the continued US military presence in places considered “exotic and tropical”. Rather than creating a contemplative place, Redecode invites the viewer to interact through QR codes that are part of the pattern on the wallpaper. The codes take the audience to constantly changing websites in which the consumption of products derived from a nature that is still considered exotic or that represents examples of a supposed “local otherness”.