Becoming Doll

Abstract

This article looks at how Puerto Rican visual artist Freddie Mercado, in his performances, uses dolls as an agentic catalyst for contesting otherness. Influenced by an Afro-Caribbean worldview, his methods for treating and relating to dolls are grounded in decolonial relations and spiritual beliefs that have survived past and current colonization processes in Puerto Rico. Mercado mirrors himself in the so-called inanimate, rendering it alive as a possibility of constant metamorphosis as well as using it as a tactics for survival. The identification process in Mercado is both a creative act and a transformative path. Mercado’s dolls allow for a fluidity of identity to emerge through a performative repertoire. By ‘becoming doll’ Mercado addresses, directly, the violence inflicted on Puerto Rican bodies by colonial objectification strategies, while, at the same time, refocusing the fixity of the Western subject--object relation.