The following painting by Firelei Báez, entitled “A taxonomy for tenderness (Carte figurative et approximative représentant pour l'année 1858 les émigrants du globe)”, explodes across a 19th century map by Charles Joseph Minard. In this document, Minard outlines patterns of global emigration in the year 1858, highlighting an interesting demographic period after the abolition of slavery in Britain and France creating a dearth of workers in European colonies.

The key in the upper right hand corner assigns highly coded colors to the movement of various populations around the world. For instance, the black lines coming out of Congo to Mauritius and Réunion Island show the passage of Africans to work on the sugar plantations owned by the French and the thick green lines dominating the map show the tremendous wave of immigration from Britain to America, Canada and Australia.

Simultaneously obscuring and flowing with the curves of the underlying diagram, two figures entwined in an embrace are blown across the composition by an invisible gust of wind. Their long swanike necks are plaited together, mimicking the shape of feathered palm tree bowing to withstand the force of a hurricane.

The two feathered forms, which the artist imagines as representations of the sun and moon – forces that create and respond to the turning of the globe – also recall the famed mantles of the Tupinambá people, the indigenous population of modern day Brazil. For the Tupinambás, birds were sacred creatures endowed with divine forces. By wearing a feather mantle, a shaman could mediate between the living and the dead. The intricately plumed avian-human hybrids occupy this kind of liminal space within the world of the painting, seemingly hovering over the map of the globe, surrounded by glowing specks of paint that echo the map’s highly stratifying key.

Lastly, this painting also recalls surrealist practices of making, specifically the urge to ascend the unknown, often through the usage of mysticism, ancient cultures and Indigenous art as a means of imagining alternative realities. In her consideration of modern representations of the Tupinambá mantles, Báez references Max Ernst’s “Robing of the Bride” (1940), in which a semi-nude female form is draped in a crimson feather cape. In Ernst’s painting, the pageantry and elegance of the image is contrasted with its primitivizing aspects. Here, Baez rejects this reading and celebrates the tenderness that is possible between nature and man while also breathing new life into the oft-forgotten populations of the nations noted as receiving unprecedented streams of immigration following the abolition of slavery.