OPEN LAB | What is your first memory of dirt?

With limited individual time slots available, we ask that you fully commit to the time that you register for. If you are not able to make it, please let us know as soon as possible so we can release the time to another participant. If all time slots are taken, please email with the subject “Waiting List: Aural Archiving” and we will reach out if a time becomes available.
As part of Yanira Castro / a canary torsi’s multisite, multi-format public art project Exorcism = Liberation and in conjunction with the installation on view in the windows of CPR from September 25 through November 6, this aural archiving project will gather participants’ foundational memories of earth in an intimate, analog recording session. Responding to the prompt “What is your first memory of dirt?”, one of the project’s slogans and sound works that will be carried across the U.S. this fall on stickers, pins, lawn signs, and handmade banners during a critical American election season, participants will be guided through a private experience of listening, contemplation, and memory, recounting their first memories of dirt on a cassette tape recorder.
Participants will sign up for an individual 20-minute time slot and engage in an autonomous recording experience. Tea and cookies will be served.
OPEN LAB invites artists and scholars to facilitate theoretical discussions and embodied workshops, providing a platform for practice-based inquiry and creative exchange.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
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), living in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn), and working at the intersection of communal practices, performance, installation, and interactive technology. Castro forms iterative, multimodal projects that center land, and the complexity of citizenship and governance in works activated and performed by the public. Since 2009, she’s created and performed with a team of collaborators as a canary torsi. Her recent work includes a performance manual for reckoning, Last Audience, a performance manual; a participatory podcast to rehearse for a collective future, Last Audience: a performance podcast; and a tea ritual created with four teens from NYC Girl Scouts Troop 6000 to enact the ingestion of home/land, TIERRA. Currently, Castro is developing her ongoing interdisciplinary work, I came here to weep, a collective exorcism for territorial possession. 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, LMCC, The Bates Dance Festival and ICA/Boston. Her work has recently been supported by Creative Capital, The MAP Fund, The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for Dance, 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Art, Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, LMCC, MacDowell, Yaddo, and Marble House Project. She has received two New York Dance and Performance (aka Bessie) Awards for Outstanding Production.

Host or Publisher CPR- Center for Performance Research