What is a liberated body? “Talking” Exorcism = Liberation with Yanira Castro (2025)

Puerto Rican-born, Brooklyn-based artist Yanira Castro and I have been in many modes of parallel play for a few decades. We both came out of the Five College Dance Department in Western Mass, shared dancers, and, very recently, converged on stage together in the work of devynn emory. We recently managed an appropriately multi-modal effort towards dialogue about her Exorcism = Liberation, a massive public art project that began in July and continues until election day. An act of intervention during the 2024 Presidential election, coordinated with a large cohort of community and arts organizations, there has been an “on-the-ground” presence in three U.S. locations with strong Puerto Rican diaspora communities. The multifaceted project is stewarded locally by Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago, IL; A.P.E. Ltd. in partnership with UMass Fine Arts Center in the Connecticut River Valley of Western Massachusetts; and a canary torsi in New York City.

In 2009, Yanira created and performed with a team of collaborators as a canary torsi. A two-time NY Dance and Performance (Bessies) Award winner, Yanira’s work has always reached beyond the confines of theatrical stages. Still, for a long time now she’s been bringing her dogged work on behalf of arts workers (see Creating New Futures, “Working Guidelines for Ethics & Equity in Presenting Dance & Performance” and “Notes on Equitable Funding from Arts Workers”) and her public projects into realms of collective action including a performance manual for reckoning; a participatory podcast to rehearse for a collective future; a tea ritual created with four teens from NYC Girl Scouts Troop 6000 to enact the ingestion of home/land; and I came here to weep, the project that has extended into Exorcism = Liberation.

Each mode in her network of creation invites us to practice, in communal construction, what radical democracy can feel like. The intersecting ambivalences of citizenship, colonization, and self-governance have led to Exorcism = Liberation, whose scope and collection of events is humbling to observe. The website welcomes participants to immerse in audio experiences while also offering Ways to Get Involved in Puerto Rico (Boricua), Chicago (Shikaakwa), Western Massachusetts (Norwottuk), and New York (Manhatta). Embedded in Puerto Rican culture, born out of the necessity to gather and build a shared future, Exorcism = Liberation activates through the familiar form of a political media campaign, placing provocative slogans on the street and mass transit, and distributing stickers, posters, handmade banners, lawn signs, and buttons/pins. The slogans reflect the project’s themes:

“What is your first memory of dirt?”

“I came here to weep”

and “Exorcism = Liberation.”

Accompanying each slogan is a QR code leading to an immersive audio experience in which local Puerto Rican performers prompt the listener to remember their connection to land, grieve, and conjure a liberated world. Along with options to sign petitions, view Centro’s documentary series on privatization as a vehicle for colonization, and YouTube channels, we are asked to work the muscle of empathy as we rehearse for collective liberation.

What flows below are bits of an asynchronous conversation across glitchy voice memos and google docs in an attempt at exchange amidst the chaos of geographic switching.

Glitch Ramblings – Attempt 1

(mnd) my phone keeps stopping the recording. I think it goes to sleep and then stops. So, I’m gonna try to manage this thing better. Thank you for accepting, receiving my scattered fractal, um, asynchronous haphazardness.

Yanira:So, let’s begin by saying that I love cross form exchange and all its glitches. So, you are sending me audio recordings that your phone is giving you trouble with because it is falling asleep while you are recording, which is loaded for me: tools that “sleep” and “rest” while the humans continue to struggle working and operating them. It is kind of a perfect metaphor for our lives of continuous labor through corporate machinations of extraction. Another conversation for another time… 🙂

But… lets maybe live in the glitch…

I promise to not edit this. To have it be conversational.

And save you the work of transcribing.

So using Google Docs to write back to you as I’m listening to you.

I am grateful for this platform, as you said, of flow and shift, as we try to communicate across geographies: I’m in Chicago today working on this project and you are in NYC or in Rhode Island (I’m not sure) teaching or taking care of family. And I recognize the time squeeze or the time making that is happening through this exchange of communication forms as we middle aged artists in this sandwich generation navigate elderly parents transitioning, children morphing and the caregiving that is also our artmaking and work with students. It is like time carving, finding the worm holes that have possibilities of depth in narrow stretches of time.

(mnd) I’m curious about exorcism as a practice, as somebody who was raised in a strict Catholic environment, who gets really excited about the thought of liberating myself from some of those structures. But, also to recognize this incredible web network, rhizome system that you’re building geographically, in land-based practices of here (NYC), and Chicago and Massachusetts. I’m curious how those relationships were forged. How each community builds within its own community.

Yanira: I’m finding myself taking deep breaths because people’s reaction to that word [exorcism] has been intense. Many have the immediate Hollywood image of a young girl’s head spinning on her neck spewing vomit. Sensationalist. The casting out of evil spirits is where many people go, an idea of demonic possession. Those kind of binaries are not very interesting to me. Although I do play with the word possession coming from a colony of the U.S. But I do find that when a practice has potency and power… it is often demonized or made suspicious by “othering.”

(mnd, pt 2): so much head nodding agreement. i think about some early usage of invocation and banishment – but also the work of purging. Even if the sensationalism of Hollywood co-opts it, how do we ex/presss systems of thought, behavior from our cellular being?

Yanira: The practice of exorcism is the practice of liberating the body.

The practice of exorcism is the practice of liberating the body.

What is a liberated body?

Just asking the question, stops me. I hold my breath. My chest clenches. I feel a wave of grief.

Here comes the anger: How the fuck would I know? A cis, Puerto Rican woman, colonized subject of an imperialist state that won’t recognize its own power–the most powerful form of being empire is to practice that you don’t exist, to practice behind the veil of democracy. To practice that the colonized have choice. The bureaucracy of obfuscating with false choice. In Puerto Rico, people practice voting for the presidency for the day when they might have the vote. Nevermind if that is even what is desired. Because no one really asks what is desired or what is just of the people colonized. The policy of neglect and ignorance of U.S. citizens to their role as settler is intentional.

(mnd): this also makes me wonder when am i fully at rest, outside empire and not just recovering or recharging for participation in empire

Yanira:we are all complicit. we are all complicit. capitalism makes it so. there is no way to not be complicit b/c that is the nature of relation. this is the stuff that binds that make us so angry–that by participating in society, having a phone, using A.I., holding down jobs, paying taxes and partnering with institutions–we are in the belly of the beast. I can’t know full liberation. Liberation is a process not an end point. It is relation. And so, we participate in empire and move outside of empire and are in a forced relation.

JVP has been telling us for well over a year: “None of us are free unless all of us are free.” A liberated body must be a collective body. WE. No individual is liberated. Even if the government will have you think differently and wants you to.

A liberated body is a communal body.

Exorcism is the practice of getting there. And so it is made scary. It is demonized.

All the words that I have for exorcism are spanish words: sacude, despojo.

Clean it all out. Clear it.

I think of shaking. I think of breath. I think of call and response.

(mnd): yes, clearing, cleansing, releasing, purging, secrete, excrete – out out out of us

Yanira: out of us. que se vaya! fuera!

Liberation is a communal cleansing. Not towards purity. Pero un despojó. A release. A shaking out.

Yanira: In your recording, you used these words: “geographic rhizome system” to describe the work I have been doing in NYC, Chicago, and the Connecticut Valley of Western MA with communities, building and forging relationships and how that work might happen.

I will be honest and say that “community” is a tough word for me. Probably most people navigating diasporic realities will agree. What is community? The way it is used it often feels like a set of people that somehow know that they are in community. Does being in community propose others are not? It is the knowing part–knowing if you are in community–that always feels like a state of being: you are in community or you are not. I like better your words: rhizome and relations. These feel like a process for me.

I relate to the image of forging networks underground, in the dirt, beneath. I imagine it as a practice of putting out feelers, tentacles looking for light and connection and creating a web, a system not unlike our circulatory system, the roots of trees. Relation can mean next to, intertwined with, alongside, in opposite directions from. And a significant part of the practice of “Exorcism = Liberation” is the practice of liberation through conscious relation and deepening those systems.

The organizations that have come together to bring this project life have been weaved through time and relation. I’ve spent time in Chicago sharing work. I went to school at Amherst College in Western MA. It would take me forever to explain to you how this person who I went to school with, who introduced me to that person, that other person who I met at a panel and who built Creating New Futures with me, and who introduced me to that professor, who introduced me to the librarian. The rhizomes are deep and thick b/c it is a lifetime of living and being present and wanting and desiring to forge deeper connections. Sometimes those shoots are me just saying, I really want to know and understand this organization because it is powerful and I feel a connection… but always if that connection happens it is because of the people that felt that connection to. Not the mission, although that helps, but the people who felt the desire to be in relation.

So… not so much community… but relation, relation, relation… which is about being there, and doing the work of saying yes and listening and returning, always returning. Activists know this. I always think of Act Up in this regard. And I also always think of the The Seventh Generation Principle and how our decisions must be made in consideration for sustaining a planet for seven generations into the future. The kin we have not met, will never meet. The kin we love.

(mnd): I’m thinking about how I ran into you at LMCC’s Art Center on Governor’s Island and how your handwork, the work with material items has evolved?

Yanira: Lately, that sense of relation has grown to the intimate object. Making papier-mache masks for audience members that act as chambers for weeping, that invite sensorial experience through the occlusion of sight. Personally, it feels like a spiritual practice to be making something that takes so long as an individual mask for a future person that comes to be with the work. It is my way of saying: I thought of you. I wondered about you. I made this for you. I am curious about you. And I think that the objects resonate in that way.

With “Exorcism = Liberation” that comes through for me in the stickers and the pins. All the hands that will move these materials across places and time. We have already handed out over 5,000 stickers and over 1,500 pins. These travel. These go out. These find other places. They are out there like QR portals waiting for the human who sees a pin on a backpack that says “Dirt” and wonders, asks to scan the QR code from the back pack owner, and finds themself listening to a story of migration and land and crossings. Or the human who is waiting for the bus and discovers a sticker that says “I came here to weep,” and thinks: what the fuck? And scans the QR code and is transported to a disaster on their bus ride.

This is how this counter-campaign of “Exorcism = Liberation” works–through objects that act as portals into experience, that tap into your emotional reservoirs when you least expect it. Hopefully serving as reminders that we are all connected, part of a body that desires liberation.

Glitch Ramblings – Part 2

(mnd) Hi. If you’re also listening… i think my head cold left those dispatches a bit foggy and reflective. So, I’m dropping back in here to keep multiple intelligences active. And, honor, this poor body that I keep feeding raw garlic (and a nap) but plan to move across state lines again in the am back to RI.

Yanira: This new set of recordings from you, arrived with clear non-connectors. Meaning I received it as six audios where part of what you were saying was missing. And so, it would end, trail off and then suddenly pick up somewhere else where I knew you had been talking for a bit.

And I thought it reminded me of early morning conversations by the water, when your attention is moving between the person speaking, the sun rising, the water lapping. And it isn’t as important that every word is captured but that there is a flow of attention between what is happening … in this case the water is media, the sun is geographic traveling … and me listening to you at 1am in the morning and you recording at another time.

Here is what floated by me.

A lot of equations that I have questions about:

Education = liberation

Could or did or might the liberal art space make room for questions and ideas, less successful experimentation, expansion, porousness of possibility.

(hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm …. I….. don’t …… know…….)

I’m grateful for the liberal art space that meant I could discover experimental forms.

But there is privileging of certain kinds of states of ways of being (the argument/the thesis) that in my older years (and believe me, I can argue) I am wondering about their use as true expansion of knowledge.

In the recording you talked about: In dance or any art form really: mentors gearing work towards “success” rather than “authorship.” They wouldn’t let the work be the work.

(mnd): I mentioned Alexis Pauline Gumbs/undrowned. Here’s the quote I was thinking of: “What if school, as we used it on a daily basis, signaled not the name of a process or institution through which we could be indoctrinated, not a structure through which social capital was grasped and policed, but something more organic, like a scale of care.”

Yanira: This makes me think about the most successful ways lately, for me, for learning and connection have been through living together, cooking for one another, dancing together. No agenda other than to live and take care of each other and be present. It feels radically free to not be trying to persuade.

(mnd): I felt like I’ve been trying to explain colonization, like, the practices of colonization to these outside chairs that Hunter’s former president kept sending in to our little department. So that they could understand what we were experiencing, where before we “mattered” financially, we had more autonomy. I still can’t get us all the way to “what does that mean in dance? in a dance department? Like, how are we helping, how are we getting to liberatory practices in the body, in our bodies, not the body, in our bodies when we’re in these fraught, imperial, hierarchical, education spaces?

Yanira: You almost made this equation: UNDER-RESOURCED = AUTONOMY

(ooooooooooooooooooooo ……….. Well…………………. Yep………. And …… under-resourced in Puerto Rico means you can’t get to a hospital b/c the ambulance takes hours to get to you and the hospitals closer to you have been shut down… and so your loved one dies waiting or on the way… from things that are survivable. But conscious under-resourcing (read: AUSTERITY measures) have made it so that so many don’t survive and few can thrive except the ones that understand that thriving means cooperation with the regime, grifting and corruption. That is colonization. Pretending that AUSTERITY leads to anything other than grifting and formations of power through stealing from the people.)

Liberation is the communal body.

Liberation is the practice of the communal body.

(mnd) I have this dream of, well, what’s one of my utopias is that I could just walk my body down the street and not worry about any kind of violence upon it. I could have no clothing and still know that it was a safe body. So, yeah, that’s different than a liberated body, but just thinking how physical and other forms of harm wouldn’t be necessarily visited upon me. That feels like safety instead of liberation, but I was wandering into thinking about that.

Yanira: (ah. Ah. ah. ah.)

(mnd): I feel like “none of us are free, until all of us are free” has been screamed at us our whole lives, whether we’ve ever really attended to it or not. And, what is the cost to our comfort on the way to our freedom? I’m reading/listening to “Psalm for the Wild Built” by Becky Chambers. Imagining that world has been calming. It follows a non-binary tea monk in some future world where the robots have gained consciousness and left humans to go be in the undesigned world.

Yanira: I find myself yearning… an undesigned world. What am I yearning for…. Is that freedom?

I’ve been talking to a lot of people about one of the slogans of the project, What is your first memory of dirt?, and talking about often the first memories are two pronged: desire and rules. Often people either tell me a sensorial experience–the desire to eat the dirt, to put their hands in it, to make mudpies, to dig, to play. Or, that they were punished if they played in the dirt. That their parent would scold them.

For the folx where the rules came up first as a memory–I try to ask, the rule was the shock and you remember it. It was a block. What you recall is the rejection of your desire. What was your desire?

If you push back enough, go back enough in your memory of dirt… I think we can locate desire and in locating desire… I think that is freedom. Everything else that comes after that is control.

An undesigned world is some idea of freedom.

(mnd) One question I would have is… you’ve been now in this for some months now, so I wonder, what’s your like energy signature right now? What is your, um, what are your days feeling like? How are you feeling yourself moving through a lot of space, in relationships, and into new relationships?

Yanira: That traveled straight through me. Oh my god, thank you.

Oh.

Ah.

Hah.

Huh.

Uh.

Yes, thank you for asking that question.

I am so vibratory, so filled with relation, so filled with listening and welcoming and greeting and gathering and making… that I am over saturated. My colors are like deep, broody gem colors—purples and velvets and dark greens and midnights. Like a thundercloud that cannot absorb another droplet of water… I know the deluge is coming.

I cannot read the moment, reflect on the moment, I am just deep in it. Trying to be present to what is right in front of me. I’ve been receiver and speaker/ input and output. I find myself judging–who didn’t show up, did enough people show up, did I say that right–and I SHUT IT DOWN.

It has been important to me to be present to every person who has pushed this project forward. To physically bring my body to their spaces and directly engage. It has been abundant. And I am full of love and admiration for others and wonder as I am also questioning how I could ever keep this up. I could never keep this up.

So… my energy signature is: drench. I’ve been drenched. Submerged. Swimming in relation. I’m in adoration and love and questioning and huh, and yes, and that happened.

(mnd) Maybe, the last thing would be if there is something that is shifting for you about, yes, colonization, but also about relationships and gathering and organizing.

Yanira: I did a long table last night on “Art as Civic Ritual” at 21c Museum & Hotel with ESS and brilliant guest artists (Hakeem Majeed, Tonika Lewis Johnson, Gibran Villalobos, Bindu Poroori) and brilliant audience members and we had a gorgeous conversation. And I want to end with some of what was written on the table. Their words:

“Someone earlier said they’re afraid of a revolution because: what happens the next day. I think someppl romanticize the revolution bc they believe they’ll be a part of the aftermath while others know they won’t be here to be a part of it. Because we will lose a lot but w/ that in mind I believe protests and to fight with no fear is such a beautiful love letter to future palestine and those that are also suffering around the world (when we don’t know what tomorrow will look like)”

“Do people only know what they need when it’s glaringly obvious what they lack?”

“Awards as diffuse”

“The revolution is not a one-time event.”

“Art as rehearsal for civic practice.”

“Performance as Demonstration vs Demonstration as Performance”

“My link ain’t gonna break” – Faheem

“Protest is a war strategy.

Protest is a timestamp.”

“Has art reached its end? Is its scope obsolete? How can we bear witness to this moment, this “breakdown” as a laboratory [can’t make out the word]to better future(s)?

“Art used as a way to condition the public to think a certain way? Symbols. Is that bad? Propaganda already is used in this way.”

“The fulfillment of civics is (might be?) the breakdown of art. —–> (No longer a metaphor)

Exorcism = Liberation remaining events

Oct 16 5:00pm Storytelling and Aural Archive – What is your first memory of dirt?, centering family, land, and remembrance as a collective tool towards liberation. Local teens interview their families and neighbors about their first memories of land at Holyoke Public Library with Holyoke Media. (Holyoke, MA)

Oct 17 4:30pm Activation of I came here to weep and Long Table discussion with Professor Paul Schroeder Rodriguez and La Causa students focusing on climate disaster and communal care highlighting Casa Pueblo in Puerto Rico, at Amherst College Frost Library (Amherst, MA)

Oct 17 7:00pm Community meal and activation of Exorcism = Liberation with La Causa students and faculty following library activation and dialogue. (Amherst, MA)

Oct 25 1:00pm—10:00pm Aural archive installation of What is your first memory of dirt? gathers participants’ first memories of dirt in an intimate, analog recording session at CPR – Center for Performance Research (Brooklyn, NY)

Nov 1 6:00pm Community meal and activation of What is your first memory of dirt? centering a Puerto Rican meal prepared by Castro using local ingredients from Nuestras Raíces, a grassroots urban agriculture organization based in Holyoke founded by migrating farmers from Puerto Rico. The meal will center land and remembrance as a collective tool towards liberation. Presented by A.P.E. Ltd at The Workroom @ 33 Hawley (Northampton, MA)

Nov 5 For CPR’s “OPEN HOUSE: Election Night” all three project banners will be on display, and free pins and stickers will be distributed at an election watch party at CPR – Center for Performance Research (Brooklyn, NY)