Yanira Castro on Exploring Memories Toward Collective Freedom
Exorcism = Liberation at Co-Prosperity in Chicago. Photo by Olivia Junell.
On a rainy Friday afternoon, I walked into the Center for Performance Research in Brooklyn, New York, where the artist Yanira Castro set up a collaborative, meditative experiment for the public to engage with as one of the components of her multi-location project: Exorcism = Liberation. A banner hanging behind the gallery’s street-facing window posed the central question of the exercise: “What is your first memory of dirt?”
Alone in the space, I followed a sequence of actions that tapped into all my senses: smelling the potent fragrance of guava as I cut the fruit in half on my knees; hearing the narrative of a distant past in the mountains of Puerto Rico coming through a tape recorder as I sipped on a herbal tea composed of yagrumo leaves; blowing air into the microphone as I recalled my memory of dirt, mimicking the sounds of waves and wind. Castro’s inklings were precise in creating this set of instructions, unlocking a speculative process into the collective consciousness I’m implied in. I could see that fence in my backyard growing up, seducing me to ask what was behind it.
After I left my recording, I floated aimlessly through Brooklyn, still feeling and digesting this meditative state. A week later, I sat down with Castro. Itching to ask how she got me exactly where she wanted me, we spoke about this process as a means to exorcise, approach people’s memories with a defined intention, and explore notions of affective citizenship.
How did you conceive this multifaceted project? What have you been working on to arrive at this expansive endeavor involving community organizing?
Castro: My last two projects have taken on this octopus-like form where they begin as one thing, and then they keep platforming into other types of ways of encountering the public. This project began with this performance, an exhibition, and meals that I did at the Chocolate Factory Theater in Astoria, NYC, titled I Came Here to Weep. That was already a multifaceted project with performances in the evenings, installations that people could activate, and meals on Sundays.
That for me was really about finding different ways to be in connection with people: Who's going to come to a meal? Who's going to come to a performance? And who's going to come to the event during the day? Why not give the public the chance to activate those installations on their terms? I've been finding new ways to engage audiences, to look at the same work in different ways once a project is completed instead of letting it go and moving on to something else; to letting things begin to mutate. I began to think about what wasn't there, what could be there.
Concerning I Came Here to Weep, I had a very simple premise. But all the while, I kept thinking about how you get to the American public. And so that became a question of, “How does this turn into a public art project? How does this get out there?” As soon as you walked in, it stated very boldly on a poster that this is a work for Americans to perform. And already a part of the project was that, inside the installations, there were these sound scores that invited people during the day to activate the installations in different ways. And so what I decided to do with the public artwork was to take those scores and condense them to a five-minute, no longer than 10 minutes, poetic, sonic experience for the public to consider during the election. So that's how that happened.
Yanira Castro’s Exorcism = Liberation at The Clemente in New York City. Photo courtesy of Yanira Castro.
You mentioned I Came Here To Weep, and I could see there was a natural evolution—how you started to ask further questions about what was the next thing that could occur in your work. In describing that piece on your website, you talk about how it instigates audience assembly, transmission, and revenge. Can you talk a little bit about why revenge?
Castro: Some people speak of Puerto Rico as the oldest colony. I know that's also contested, but it's been a colony for a long time. And I am thinking about that generational experience, that maybe some would call trauma. These are the facts, and my audience is American. Because I live in the United States, I have often felt there is this energy with American audiences in which there's this barrier of knowledge that obscures the legibility of a certain kind of work I am trying to get across. In other words, if I'm doing a project that in some way is speaking about Puerto Rico, there's all this history that an American audience intentionally is ignorant of, right? Educating that audience is a point of contention for me. As an artist, I don't want to waste my time. That is their work to do, not mine. So in refuting that, how do I deal with this audience with these questions of power?
Revenge, letting the situation be what it is, feels important. So what are the scores of revenge? In the case of I Came Here to Weep, the score takes the Treaty of Paris of 1898 and redacts it. It tries to take all that obfuscation, that legal and political language, and condense it to what it is essentially doing: taking Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam and colonizing it—making it clear in this particular text that the political status of these native inhabitants of Puerto Rico is to be determined by Congress, which, is still true to this day. So that action of redaction is an action of revenge.
This is the way I was trying to think about it and to include the public in that act of revenge because it isn't just myself as a Puerto Rican wanting revenge but also the public wanting to take revenge on a political system they don’t want to be part of. Revenge has a connection to this very early memory of freedom. So when I'm talking about revenge, what I'm talking about really is direct action. I think just revenge has a place.
Outside the Chocolate Factory Theater. Photo by Maria Baranova.
Outside the Chocolate Factory Theater. Photo by Maria Baranova.
Thank you for expanding on that. How are you working specifically with materials that are very present in elections, like posters and stickers? I'm interested as to what feelings, topics, or curious details specific to this election cycle, both in Puerto Rico and the U. S., have shaped your current thoughts around our social contract, emancipation, and citizenship.
Castro: When I was beginning to think about a public art project, I began to think about graphic design as being a really important element, considering that Puerto Rico has a long history of protest posters. So I ensured that I was working with Puerto Rican designers who knew that history. For instance, Alejandro Torres Vieira and Luis Vasquez O'Neill went on a deep dive into fonts.
In the 1970s, a lot of protests featured posters using this new font, Antique Olive, that had been created in Europe as a form of protest against Palatino. They took on that language, that font, as a way to put these slogans out. This kind of research, thinking about legacy through Puerto Rican graphic design, was very significant to me. I was also interested in large murals, which, of course, have their history in Puerto Rico, and within its diaspora like in Chicago. Here in New York, we did these large slogan-like murals, where we took up the entire garage door of the Chocolate Factory Theater with the phrase “Exorcism = Liberation”. At the A. P. E. Gallery in Northampton, MA, we also took up their entire garage door for a mural. At the Clemente Center in LES, we took their historic building and put posters outside. And in Chicago, at Co-Prosperity, we took over six windows.
These expansive, public mural-type works felt important because I wanted to capture an audience that would often walk by these spaces. Yes, I also organized lots of events, but the events are personal ways to connect with the work. Thousands of people have listened to the sound scores, mostly because of the murals. Also, the 600 lawn signs in Chicago. That city has a boulevard system that connects to parks and medians. So during election seasons, these areas are filled with lawn signs. The idea was to have lawn signs projected, alongside election lawn signs, that don't speak to a particular candidate but rather to an immersive experience; a connection and a feeling. In speaking to each of the organizations we were involved with, we were trying to build access and explore how communication proliferates in their areas.
Lawn signs in Chicago. Photo courtesy of Yanira Castro.
Lawn signs in Chicago. Photo courtesy of Yanira Castro.
Funny enough, I live near the Center for Performance Research, which is where I first saw your “Exorcism = Liberation” banner. In preparation for this interview, I decided to do the participatory component of your project there, which felt like a multisensory meditation. I wanted to ask, how did you land on the specific materials and elements you made available for participants to explore their first memory of dirt? There seems to be an attention to various sensibilities.
Castro: I start from the place of sharing my personal experience without telling my story. For example, my first memory of dirt is of a farm my grandparents had, where there was a guava tree—hence the guava pastries. The photograph on the table was also of my family at that farm. I trust that even if I'm not telling you all the details, there's a certain amount of care in letting you into my world.
And then I connect all of that to history. The voice you hear on the tape recorder is my mother’s, from an interview I conducted for a different project but never used. She's talking about a different farm and sugar cane in Puerto Rico, which is a very political subject there. In that interview, I was trying to be present with her and her experience, but at the same time trying to be like, “Who did that sugar cane go to?” And she would insist that it went to people in Yauco. And I'm like, “What are people in Yauco doing with the sugar cane?”
No, it had to have eventually gone to Domino Sugar. Then again, she probably didn’t know that as a child. This was what she experienced on that farm as a child. So it became about how memory warps a certain relationship to land, right? And the way that she talks about the workers. It's very idyllic in the way that she's talking about it. I wasn't there, and all the people who worked those farms have now passed away.
But I have to assume there weren’t great working conditions because it was the 1930s and ‘40s in Puerto Rico. So I paired her story with the newspaper article also on the table, which was written by the USDA government. This is my way of providing different ways for you to be in relation with all this—through personal, historical, and governmental language—but also pastelillos from a pastry shop in the East village. I’m trying to make for a multisensory set of experiences. This is why I asked you to be on your hands and knees to cut the guava, and then put your belly on the ground to blow into the microphone, which I hope recalls some memory of being a child. I want to give you some embodied scores to consider.
It's fascinating because in my case when I was remembering my first instance of dirt, I was on my knees and stomach, crawling in my childhood home's backyard, looking for a tunnel where the grass meets the fence wall covered in flowery vines. Even though I knew what was behind that wall, there was still something calling my curiosity.
Castro: My interest in asking, “What is your first memory of dirt?” has a lot to do with our very earliest selves not knowing boundaries or beginning to understand boundaries. So for you, there was a fence. You can't get through the fence! I have a very explicit memory of my parents saying, “You can't cross the road.” That had to do with ideas of safety and the cars, and all that is true. But to the child, this idea of expanse.
And so that very earliest memory often entails freedom and then bumping up against where that freedom stops. When I read about people's first experiences of dirt, they're often sensorial. They’re really flooded with sensations but almost right away they’re followed up with stuff like, “My mother didn't want me to get dirty.” There’s that boundary, right? The rules I couldn't cross. And that’s not very different from migration. What are these boundaries? What are these borders? Who do they keep out?
How do you negotiate in your mind the exploration of memory through the action of exorcism to explore new futures and freedom? Taking into account that nostalgia as you were describing—how we want to remember things a certain way, idealism.
Castro: Exorcism is the liberation of the body, and our memories are lodged in our bodies. I think that when we can tap into those experiences and release them, that is a form of liberation. It's a form of exorcism. I know there can be a very sensationalist way of thinking about exorcism that is not very useful. But when I think of exorcism, I think of the word “sacude” (to shake off). I think of the cleansing, the release, the letting go, the letting out. I think about ritualistic practices that have to do with shaking, that have to do with finding ways for our bodies to resonate out into space. It is something that the puritanical spirit is very afraid of, right?
This is why we see 12-year-old girls spewing bile and levitating in movies, because tapping into the power of what the body can do, and what the body does when it releases, is powerful and transformational. So that's the way I'm thinking about exorcism concerning memory.
In that installation, there were words on the wall that were verbs like “jump” and “shake.” Those verbs came from reading about different forms of exorcism in different cultures and categorizing actions. People are concerned about this idea of exercising spirit. And so asking you to place your stomach against the floor is one of them; hands and knees crawling, as well as shaking and vibrating. I come from a tradition of considering placing your body in relation to an action. And when you let yourself reside there long enough, something else can happen if you allow yourself to be embodied inside that experience. And so that, with the sound scores, was my offering to the participant. If you're here long enough, trust that your body will take you somewhere.
