![Photo by Josefina Santos/ New York Times.](https://creative-capital.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Castro_Yanira_Castro_Portraits_NYTimes_JosefinaSantos_HighRes-1-web-optimized-62-599x750.jpg)
Yanira Castro
Brooklyn, NY
Yanira Castro’s work is rooted in communal construction as a rehearsal for radical democracy. She is an interdisciplinary artist born in Borikén (Puerto Rico) and lives in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn). Castro develops performance scores and scenarios where the work unfolds in real time in response to the presence and participation of the audience. Co-creating with her collaborators and the public under the name a canary torsi, she investigates choreography as a practice of collective embodiment, grappling with agency and communal action as a body politic. The process of gathering, witnessing, and decision-making is where performance and civics merge and, for her, is the critical, challenging, and transformational work of performance. She is the recipient of a 2022 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for Dance, a 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Interdisciplinary Artist Fellowship and has received two Bessie Awards for Outstanding Production. She has recently been in residence at MacDowell, Yaddo, and The Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography. She developed Last Audience: a performance manual, a publication with the MCA Chicago during the pandemic for audiences to perform at home, and Last Audience: a performance podcast, a three-part space opera grounded in Borikén. During the 2024 presidential election, she is developing a public art project through collective citywide experiences in New York City, Chicago, and Western Massachusetts, titled Exorcism = Liberation. The project utilizes familiar forms of political media campaigns to immerse the public in sonic experiences, calling us to grieve, remember, and liberate.
Photo by Josefina Santos/ New York Times.
Events
- Yanira Castro: Exorcism = Liberation Events through November 1, 2024
- Yanira Castro: I came here to weep August 12 — August 13, 2023
![](https://creative-capital.org/wp-content/uploads/projects/i-came-here-to-weep/Castro_Weep_Baranova-7897-1600x1067.jpg)
I came here to weep. Photo by Katie Dean.
I came here to weep. Photo by Katie Dean.
I came here to weep / Exorcism = Liberation
Yanira Castro’s work is rooted in communal construction as a rehearsal for radical democracy. She is an interdisciplinary artist born in Borikén (Puerto Rico) and lives in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn).
Artist BioI came here to weep is a multimodal project that investigates colonial power, self-determination and complex relations of citizenship vis-à-vis Borikén (Puerto Rico). It is composed of a series of scores and events that interweave, thicken and inform one another, inviting the public to create their own engagement through multiple forms of witnessing, participating and activating the work. The project is a set of participatory scores for the public to enact, communal meals, dances for mourning, and a tea ritual developed with Boricua teens from Girl Scouts Troop 6000 centering land/control/freedom/
Exorcism = Liberation is the public art iteration of I came here to weep. Building on the project’s themes of occupation, land, and self-determination, Exorcism = Liberation brings the project to the streets of three Puerto Rican diasporic centers—New York City, Chicago, and Western MA—through collective citywide experiences. Exorcism = Liberation utilizes familiar forms of political media campaigns to immerse the public in sonic experiences, distributing stickers, posters, handmade banners, lawn signs and buttons/pins through local community and art organizations. Exorcism = Liberation is an act of intervention, a rehearsal for collective action during a critical American election.