Yanira Castro / a canary torsi: Exorcism = Liberation: I came here to weep with Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, Sami Hopkins & Theodore (ted) Kerr

This event was a collective conversation with the public. We did not have permission to share the general public's part of that 1.5 hour conversation, so we are sharing parts of the conversation that were held and stewarded by the facilitators. We hope this provides a sense of the full conversation.

Saturday, September 21st, at 2pm, ISSUE Project Room hosts a long table discussion around the public art project, Exorcism = Liberation, by Puerto Rican-born, Brooklyn-based artist and choreographer Yanira Castro. It began as a multimodal project in 2023, I came here to weep, for assembling, raising, dismantling, and reconstructing ways of inhabiting together, and has grown into a larger series of participatory scores and rehearsals for collective survival. During this year’s critical American election, I came here to weep is but one of several slogans in Exorcism = Liberation’s call-to-action. Castro invites artists from across ISSUE’s history including Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste (2017 Artist-In-Residence), Sami Hopkins (2021 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow), and Theodore (ted) Kerr (2022 SFCF), to investigate questions about our relationships to land, self-determination, migration and climate disaster. With this project, Castro engages the American public to experience future-building embedded in Puerto Rican culture and the U.S.’s ongoing colonial history. Exorcism = Liberation desires a different conversation during the U.S. election, one that weaves stronger connections and explores grief as necessary healing.

Coordinated with a multitude of participating community organizations between July–November 2024, Exorcism = Liberation will have an “on-the-ground” presence in three U.S. locations with strong Puerto Rican diaspora communities. It is stewarded locally by A.P.E. Ltd. in partnership with UMass Fine Arts Center in the Connecticut River Valley of Western Massachusetts; Experimental Sound Studio (ESS) in Chicago, IL; and a canary torsi in New York City. In 2012, a canary torsi was invited for a residency through ISSUE’s Floating Points Program to explore the blurred lines between sound and movement. Since 2009, the group has developed multidisciplinary site-adaptable performance projects, transforming traditional venues or highlighting unconventional sites, constructing scenarios to engage audiences in a personal encounter with the work. 

As a part of the greater public art project, Castro will utilize familiar forms of political media campaigns by placing provocative slogans on the street and mass transit, distributing stickers, posters, handmade banners, lawn signs and buttons/pins through local community organizations acting as these distribution hubs. The slogans reflect the project’s themes: 

"What is your first memory of dirt?"

"I came here to weep," 

and "Exorcism = Liberation."

The unique environment of ISSUE’s 22 Boerum Pl. theater provides an ideal laboratory for experimentation, where a limited-capacity audience can experience projects in-process. In service of our community, ISSUE invites artists to engage with a space in transition, and to question infrastructural and curatorial boundaries. Exorcism = Liberation is free for ISSUE Members. To find out about other activations and events in New York City, Chicago and Western Massachusetts, please visit exorcism-liberation.net/events.

Yanira Castro (she/ella) is a Puerto Rican interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of communal practices, performance, installation, and interactive technology. She forms iterative, multimodal projects that center collective action in works activated and performed by the public. Since 2009, she’s created and performed with a team of collaborators as a canary torsi. Their recent work includes a performance manual for reckoning; a participatory podcast to rehearse for a collective future; and I came here to weep, a collective exorcism for americans to perform.  Castro has been commissioned and presented by The Chocolate Factory Theater, New York Live Arts, MCA Chicago, The Invisible Dog Art Center, SPACE Gallery, PICA, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The Bates Dance Festival and ICA/Boston. Her work has recently been supported by Creative Capital, The MAP Fund, The Alpert Award, a NYSCA/NYFA Interdisciplinary Artist Fellowship, Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, LMCC, MacDowell, Yaddo, Gibney and Marble House Project.  She has received two New York Dance & Performance (aka Bessie) Awards for Outstanding Production.

Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste’s work, spanning roles as artist, composer, and performer, considers errant relations that push toward the limits of subjectivity. Toussaint-Bapiste’s fellowships and awards include the Camargo Foundation Core Program Fellowship, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts Sound Artist-In-Residence, Bessie Award for Outstanding Music Composition and Sound Design, the Jerome Foundation Airspace Residency at Abrons Arts Center, Issue Project Room 2017 Artist-In-Residence, and the Rauschenberg Residency 381 Residency. Recent exhibitions and performances include Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles, California; The Institute of Contemporary Art at VCU, 1708 Gallery, Richmond, Virginia; Berlin Atonal, Berlin, Germany; MoMA PS1, Queens, New York; Performance Space, New York, New York; The Kitchen, Brooklyn, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, New York. They are an Assistant Professor in Sculpture & Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University and current Triple Canopy Fellow.

Sami Hopkins is an artist, writer-researcher, and musician between Philadelphia and New York. Across projects, their work concerns the interplay between subjective experience, social (political, symbolic) context, and the materials these encounters produce. Sami was a Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow at ISSUE Project Room in 2021, a Critical Writing Fellow at Recess, and recently completed a 2023 Christiania Research Residency.

Theodore (ted) Kerr was ISSUE´s 2022 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow. He presented THE BODY POPULAR, a curated series of gatherings and broadcasts, propelled by artists, podcasters, writers, and others in NYC across the U.S. invested in questions around power, community, knowledge, and consumption in the 21st century. Kerr is the co-author of We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production (Duke University Press, 2022, with Alexandra Juhasz). In 2021 he curated AIDS, Posters and Stories of Public Health: A People's Pandemic for the National Libraries of Medicine, and in 2017 he was one of 4 oral historians who worked on Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic: An Oral History Project for the Smithsonian, Archives for American Art. He is a founding member of the international collective What Would an HIV Doula Do?. Additionally, Ted is an adjunct instructor at The New School and Manhattan College offering classes on HIV, memorialization, media, literature, sociology, and NYC.