- September 21, 2025
Past event ✧
- Long table with Yanira Castro, Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, and Theodore (ted) Kerr at ISSUE Project Room
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.