Yanira Castro’s Exorcism = Liberation Is a Public Art Campaign for Divided Times

Stroll through New York City, Chicago, or Western Massachusetts in the next month and a half and you might encounter a somewhat mysterious provocation on a poster, or in a window:

“Exorcism = Liberation”

“I came here to weep”

“What is your first memory of dirt?”

Yanira Castro, the multidisciplinary artist behind those slogans, hopes you’ll be intrigued enough to scan the QR code accompanying them—and that, from there, you’ll listen to the three transportive audio experiences that compose her public art project, Exorcism = Liberation.

Conceived in response to the upcoming presidential election “as an act of intervention,” the audio pieces explore grief, climate disaster, connection to land, protest, and more. Each is deeply informed by Castro’s Puerto Rican identity. “That’s the real origin story of this project,” she says. “The place of my birth—its relationship to the United States, and its lack of self-determination.”

Castro and her team, a canary torsi, worked with mostly Puerto Rican artists on the project, which can be accessed both online and through the many posters, banners, and signs throughout the three locales Exorcism = Liberation calls home, each chosen for its significant Puerto Rican population. Castro will also be hosting “activations” in each city through early November, including dinners, performances by dancers Martita Abril and devynn emory, and a storytelling event featuring local teens.

Castro spoke about Exorcism = Liberation, and the impact she hopes the project has ahead of the election.

What is the origin story of this project?
Coming from a place where the people are colonized and don’t have access to the vote, it is important for me to be thinking about what that means, that a community gets together and makes decisions about its future. But we don’t really talk about it that way. We talk about it as an individual event—“my vote.” So this idea of communing around election time and thinking about what the community is and how we want to support one another is really critical for me.

Most people will be engaging with this project wherever they encounter it, while others will have a more collective experience at the activations. How do you imagine the work landing differently in those two settings?
I think when we attend performance, there is a temporary community coming together, and there’s something very powerful about that. The audio scores offer very simple gestures; maybe it’s opening your hands on your lap. So seeing a group do it, and being a part of a group that’s consciously doing this thing together is one kind of experience. But if you’re listening to one of the scores out in public—let’s say you’re riding a bus, and it asks you to open your hands, and then it asks you to look around and see if anybody else has their hands open. You might see people who have their hands open and wonder, Are they listening to what I’m listening to, or do they just have their hands open? But the idea is that this is a community, this is your neighbor, and you might be thinking or doing the same thing. It’s trying to make that connection.

I’m curious to hear more about your interest in exorcism. Do you see weeping—as in the slogan “I came here to weep”—as a kind of exorcism?
There’s been research done that when we have a real weep session, there is a relief and a letting go inside of our bodies that then allows us to be more open to something else. So in that way, for me, it’s an exorcism. In Puerto Rican culture and in other Latinx cultures, we have this word “sacude,” and it means cleansing. But like many problems with translation, it’s more than that. There’s a spiritual connection to that word and an exorcism connection to that word.

In Puerto Rico, right now especially, there’s a lot of tension around the American presence on the island. It’s very fraught. So this idea of expulsion is also something that’s in my mind when I’m thinking about exorcism.

How do you see this project speaking to the current election?
For me, the election is very superficial. It often sounds like, What do we need to say to get that individual voter to feel invested enough in order to vote for me?—as opposed to thinking about what we want to create for the future, or, even more importantly, a recognition that what happens in the United States affects so many people outside of the United States. We’re not asked to consider our effect on one another.

All of the materials in this project are election-type materials, like stickers and pins and lawn signs. Those are some of my favorite objects, because they’re movable, so the public can decide where this project goes. In that way, the project is being carried through time and space to others that I can’t possibly know about. The public isn’t just listening to the work, but they’re taking it out and dispersing it.

One of my favorite things is thinking about these lawn signs, right next to these election signs, and people just taking a moment to stop and have a contemplative five-minute experience, and think about how we are deeply connected, and how deeply our choices matter. What world do we want to create and live in?

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