My Heart Will Taste Its Wind
Join us on March 13 as artists Star Feliz and Giancarlo Montes Santangelo gather for a conversation on their practices and themes explored within Feliz’s artists’ book, When Eye Land, published by Printed Matter in 2023. The pair will touch on methods of storytelling with archival photography, depicting natural and imagined landscapes, and forging identity through connection to an ancestral past.
When Eye Land builds on Feliz’s research-based installation work, wading into memory, intimacy, land, and spirit — weaving historical texts and photos, colonial maps, fabulated letters, and the artist’s own family albums to explore how the legacy of colonialism has shaped the national identity of the Dominican Republic. When Eye Land was shortlisted for the 2023 Paris Photo-Aperture PhotoBook Award. Read more about the book.
Image credit: To fill the West Indies salt shakers, a wheelbarrow brigade quarries a mountainside. Photograph from When Eye Land by Star Feliz. Originally by B. Anthony Stewart from “The Land Columbus Loved,” National Geographic, 1944.
Star Feliz is a Dominican-American installation artist originally from New York, NY currently based in Los Angeles, CA. Building upon their ancestral Afro-Taino lineage of multi-dimensional healing — Feliz employs sound, sculpture, film, earthworks, and techniques of concealment, language, and mapping to transverse the psychic legacy of everyday resistance and world-making. Under the moniker of Priestusssy they create experimental devotional music. Feliz is also the plant spirit medicine healer and founder behind Botánica Cimarrón — a brand focused on bridging connections between people and the transformative healing power of nature. They have exhibited, performed, and presented commissions nationally and internationally.
Giancarlo Montes Santangelo, native to the DC Metropolitan area, photographs and collages in an effort to map out where he comes from and where he wants to go. His images bring together his own body and staged scenes against images pulled from public and private archives made in Argentina and Puerto Rico. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.