When Eye Land

Shortlisted for the Aperture PhotoBook Award, 2023 The project builds on Star Feliz’s research-based installation work, wading into memory, intimacy, and the ancestral past to explore how the legacy of colonialism has shaped the national identity of the Dominican Republic. What gets left behind when identity and belonging is removed from a relationship to land and spirit, shaped instead within the white European patriarchal imagination? How does colonialism live and breathe in our cells and psyche, taking root in the subconscious like a spell? Who is the Dominican land? Assembled from historical texts and photos, colonial maps, fabulated letters, and the artist’s own family albums, When Eye Land confronts the twisted colonial visions of the Western gaze in Hispaniola in the late 19th and early 20th century. The publication unravels desire seated in the eye of the tourist, scientist and explorer, reflecting on how the constructed landscape (the “Land Columbus Loved” as National Geogra