Art is confrontation, in Rick Rubin Creative Behavior: A Way of Existence. “Fictional worlds are not only characters of one’s imagination; they are spread independently of us and can be called, visited and explored when needed.” Everything about speculation. Dionne Brand, IN Map of the Door without Reward: Ownershipconfirm: “To successfully find our way, it is not enough to have a map. We need a cognitive architecture and a practical mastery of pathfinding.”
Vejigantes (picture of Puerto Rican Festival) is a regular protagonist in the work of multidisciplinary artist Beatriz Amelia Whitehill. Initially, appeared in chisme As a person sitting around the table, cut and painted canvas on canvas, share the story and in The shadow of talking to us, Lurking in the background, painted directly on the canvas. The work depicts an anonymous character pointing to a gun, while the vignette is known in the character’s shadow self: the Conqueror wears Morrien’s helmet in the offensive position, lush fields burning. Initially, I thought these horned dentifribly biased creatures were framed devices in Whitehill’s work, but her latest work shows that they are more than just.
Recently, Whitehill resurrected Vejigantes through Papier-Mâché. In her practice, what is exciting is her experiment in sculpture. She is famous for painting. This timely discourse is once again consistent with Puerto Rico’s position in the news, as efforts to make the manifesto of The Clumsy Buzz, The Bad Rabbit “seguimoaquagí / We Still Here”, in the music video DTMF (2025), full of pre-hygiene nostalgia, about the changing landscape and the abdomen of American imperialism and how the natural disaster and the common 19th pandemic particularly exposed the fault lines on the island.
Through Papier-Mâché Vejigantes of Whitehill, she deconstructed and reconstructed the mid-20th century Puerto Rico map and painted the flames with sketches of vejigantes and flames on unknown figures and ox horns, showing a concrete colonial, empire and folk cartocorical meat trolley cart. These fragmented forms suggest that the map is psychological rather than fixed, which is related to mapping locality and blackness. The convincing collage is that it is formed around a clay mold in the shape of vejigante. By taking the form of this beloved and terrifying creature, these maps become the (lowercase’t) level of truth. The map is a political tool for domination, which takes white supremacist capitalist patriarchy as an ideological adhesive, twists and slaps on Spanish names.
Historically, Papier-Mâché, as folk material, was fragile, transient, and a symbol of DIY culture. When it’s paper Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovation Research Calling transformation “(rebirth)” and providing a well-known description: “It was initially unwritten, and over time, our environment was shaped.” In Whitehill’s hands, the medium transformed from a tool of domination to one of a kind of rebellion and ancestral memory. Although she is primarily known as a painter, the use of Papier-mâché can be seen as a departure from “commercial” or “institutional material” and a shift towards vernacular, blurring the boundaries between artworks, everyday family objects, artifacts and performance. Furthermore, the handheld scale has the concept of monument, but it is not a more permanent material, but rather a symbol of adaptive or lively archives. Calling this work an intervention would disinfect its radicality. It’s a confrontation of history, what stories he is telling and the weight of facts and folklore.
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