For her 2021 commission at the ICA Watershed in East Boston, Firelei Báez imagined the ruins of Haiti’s Sans-Souci Palace emerging after sea water receded from the floor of a former shipyard. The museum describes passages through a monumental sculpture and painted surfaces carrying West African indigo patterns, Caribbean sea growth and signs of healing or resistance. These are not interchangeable decorations from a general “Caribbean” storehouse. They put a Haitian reference into a port where people and goods have moved for generations.
The site is essential to the work. A palace rebuilt as an archaeological discovery in a Boston industrial space disturbs the habit of assigning certain histories to certain maps. A visitor enters from a city that narrates its own revolution and maritime past, then confronts a Haitian structure the city’s familiar story might omit. The museum identifies the Watershed as a port tied to commerce and immigrant arrivals. Báez did not need to claim that Boston and Haiti have identical histories. She built a room in which their histories could be considered together.
Báez was born in the Dominican Republic; the ICA identifies her mother as Dominican and her father as being of Haitian descent. Those biographical facts matter, but the sculpture should not be treated as a transparent diagram of her family. The two countries of Hispaniola have distinct languages, political histories and fraught relationships. Her installation uses one identifiable Haitian site and one identifiable Boston building, holding the terms of the encounter in view. Calling the work simply a celebration of shared heritage would erase the difference that makes the meeting worth thinking about.
A contemporaneous ICA announcement describes the project as a sculpture and mural, confirming that it was conceived for the Watershed rather than moved there as a ready-made object. The painted architectural skin and the paths a visitor could walk through did different jobs. One gathers visual histories on a surface; the other makes a person physically choose a route. That combination lets the work make an argument in space without requiring a single official voiceover to explain it.
The commission has since been shown elsewhere, but its East Boston form remains a useful case of what place can do to memory. Báez did not reconstruct Sans-Souci as a neutral heritage model. She staged an impossible discovery to ask which ruins a city expects to find beneath itself. The answer is not that every port is the same. It is that the boundaries of a local story can be redrawn when a Haitian palace is allowed to interrupt it.