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Destierro: Glitch, Love and Storms with Jesús Hilario-Reyes

Still from ‘La brisa va, la brisa viene’ Comfort in Disturbance scene from animated short by Jesús Hilario-Reyes, 2021.

For accessibility purposes, an Alt Text version of this Q&A is available with image descriptions here, viewable by screen readers for those who might have trouble seeing this content. Special thanks to Darryl Terrell and Nina Lucey for helping edit this text.

Since October 2020 when the following email correspondence began, we saw the “end” of the Trump era, the violent mob of white supremacists at the US capital, the Covid-19 pandemic ravage Black, Latinx, and indigenous communities, and a rise in consciousness toward the plight of our AAPI communities facing an often undiscussed or invisibilized racism. That is to say another day, another dollar in Amerikkka.

Jesús Hilario-Reyes is a Puerto Rico-born artist of Dominican descent with a lot of insights into the above-mentioned turmoil. Life’s many storms, be they personal loss or racism in the aftermaths of natural disasters, are a constant of their work. In their responses, they share many intimate moments of mourning in a truly heartfelt, intellectual, and open exchange of ideas and emotions. I feel so much love, admiration, and gratitude for Hilario-Reyes’ work and experiences shared here. Everything they say is necessary, every truth and utterance essential for us all to hear.

For those unfamiliar with Hilario-Reyes, they are “an interdisciplinary artist located at the crossroads of sonic performance, new media, and expanded cinema.” Through “iterative works” they grapple with the “impossibility of the black body, the failure of mechanical optics, and the reverb of cultural dissonance.” Hilario-Reyes makes extraordinary performances and 3D animated video works, “remixing, fragmenting and abstracting my own positionality and history as a second generation, queer, black-indigenous, immigrant, born in Puerto Rico, and whose family emigrated from the Dominican Republic.”

Additionally, through the DJ moniker Morennxxx, Hilario-Reyes is quite a fixture in the underground queer, electronic, nightlife of NYC and the world over. But they are most interested in the creative and communal spaces; “they exist in cyberspace or in real life (IRL); these projects grapple with multiplicity and safety.”

Since October, several hardships fell Hilario-Reyes, so we paused our collaboration on this dialogue to allow time for reflection and healing in an increasingly tumultuous world. But way back in October 2020 Hilario-Reyes shared what they were reading, “Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto” by Legacy Russell, which I enjoyed in audio-book form over several bubble baths. And I shared an essay, “After the Hurricane: Afro-Latina Decolonial Feminisms and Destierro” by Yomaira Figueroa, a renowned scholar in Global Afro-Diaspora Studies. I was pleasantly surprised to see Figueroa’s concept of destierro made its way into Hilario-Reyes’ recent work, performing “Destierro” at Fire Island's inaugural Juneteenth Celebration.

*Here we go:*

Jose Luis Benavides: Thank you for sending me so many images of your work-in-progress, ‘La brisa va, la brisa viene’, the work you’ve successfully crowdfunded for and have been making throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. This work and your past work contend with hurricanes, disasters, and your own personal experiences within the Afro-Puerto Rican diaspora. We see here lots of images of water and flooding. What does water mean to you, how are you relating to it as a material for making these digital images and how do you feel about depicting these flooding or overflowing images?

Jesús Hilario-Reyes: My thoughts in regard to water or bodies of water have drastically changed in the past month or so. I feel as though I may have had a sort of naïve approach or understanding of water and its power. I’ve never had a fear of water, but definitely a reasonable amount of what lies within. I learned how to swim quite early in my life, so not knowing is not necessarily within my memory. I spent about 6 years on a swim team, swimming competitively in club, and with my high school varsity team. I have always considered myself a strong swimmer, and have trained to be a lifeguard.

With that in mind, I have always found peace with being in the water. I tend to go to bodies of water whenever I feel too heavy and need to release. I have a very devotional relationship with bodies of water, and my experiences with them have transformed me in the most beautiful fulfilling ways. On my last trip to Puerto Rico in late March or early April I got to know the power of the ocean much more. Long story short, a young child, probably in middle school, got caught in a riptide at Condado Beach. She was dragged out behind the waves and was panicking, I noticed her quickly and began to swim towards her, riding the riptide along the way.

Still from ‘La brisa va, la brisa viene’ Comfort in Disturbance scene from animated short by Jesús Hilario-Reyes, 2021.

As I got to her, I got her to hold on to my body like I was trained to when I did my lifeguard training. But I did that training in a pool and not in the ocean. My body quickly exhausted itself from holding her up. And I felt the strength of my body dwindle. I could only imagine how this poor child was feeling, but luckily a few other people noticed what was happening and came to save both of us from drowning. The other problem was that the current was pulling us further out and we had to exhaust more energy to fight the current and ride the waves coming toward land. We ended up being pummeled by waves into large rocks. Here we felt safer since we were much closer to other people and only had the worry of maybe getting cuts and bruises from the rocks. Afterward, we made sure she was okay and got her to a medic nearby.

I was with some friends who were also visiting, who didn’t even notice this all happening haha, as they were busy flirting with their trade. We got really drunk and had a great night afterward. It didn’t hit me at first, the importance of that experience until later in my trip The next morning, a friend of mine who also happened to be in Puerto Rico on vacation, headed out to visit the Rainforest with their ‘Trade’ they have been talking to. They ended up at Playa Escondida, which is a secluded beach that is very difficult to get to, you have to hike 30 minutes through a mangrove forest.

This beach is considered one of the most dangerous beaches on the island, because of its strong riptides and its subterranean cave system that tends to drag people under. I came to find this out, after doing research on what happened next. I’m not sure how it happened, but they ended up getting pulled out at sea and the person they were with, the ‘trade’ mentioned before, actually drowned and passed away. The police were called to remove his body from the water.

My experience and my friends have sort of demolished what I thought about the ocean generally. I am a huge fan of Drexciya, an American electronic music duo composed of James Stinson and Gerald Donald. Who was based in Detroit, Michigan, and was a huge leading star in the development of Techno. They created this expansive sonic realm that envisioned Drexciya as this underwater civilization composed of mutated human beings who were able to adapt and sustain life underwater. These Drexciyan’s were descendants of newborn babies thrown off the ledge of ships, during the middle passage by enslaved African women. This world-building not only expanded in the deep ocean but also in deep space, a sort of trajectory that was hopeful and transformative of generational trauma.

I’m a true fanatic, but also a techno-centric DJ and their ideologies show up a lot in my ideas. I believe the practice of Love has a lot to do with the ability to imagine otherwise (will talk about later) With that in mind, water is incredibly bigger than us. Water often feels like a vehicle, it sort of brings you back... every time. It reminds you of your mortality, of the fragility of life, and the expansiveness of this world, this planet. It shrinks you, and undoes you -spiritually, physically in every way. It also holds so much and has space for it. It's abundant and scarce at the same time. It has the potential to destroy you, your home, and your sense of stability. It can completely destabilize an entire nation. Especially in this case.

I want to emphasize that; I do not believe that space is the place, I do not believe that deep-underwater civilizations are the answer. I truly believe that we are just enough, that we as human beings on Earth are just enough. The absurdity and rightful one of imagining otherwise- to places we have not adapted to, biologically is valiant and important. These images and scenes with flooding water create an uninhabitable (for comfortable human life) or ravaged scenario, where the character is moving through this space, burdened. Is the exact absurdity that comes with this reality we exist in.

This work looks at Carnival practices and how characters are created. For example, the carnivals following the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans were adaptive, in the creation of new figures within the celebration. Certain communities ridiculed governmental personnel (whose actions and misactions lead to the destruction of many Black communities) by creating characters around them. This sort of ridicule is at the heart of Carnival practices since the beginning of its conception.

That’s what I’m communicating with these images. Ridicule, Absurdity. My concern with this is how this work reads to my family and to other environmental disaster survivors. I’m trying to handle this project with care. So I ask my family how they feel about it, and what surfaces when they see these images. My mother, who has persevered through many hurricanes, tells me about how her experiences or thoughts around hurricanes resurface, but she isn’t retraumatized. She’s more supportive of the ways I’m navigating these heavy ideas. I’ve asked my family who lives there now and it's the same response from them. Talking about this as a means of coping but also transforming their experience into a healthier more sustainable understanding of community.

Still from ‘La brisa va, la brisa viene’ Undying Sound scene from animated short by Jesús Hilario-Reyes, 2021.

JLB: Yomaira Figueroa describes “the concept of destierro” as “an untranslatable term for exile in Spanish, which is akin to being torn from land because destierro remains a relevant and precarious condition for Black and Indigenous peoples”. You mentioned having some conversations about displacement and Puerto Rico with your mother after reading the essay. What did you talk about and how do you feel about this notion of destierro?

JHR: Ever since reading about this concept of ‘destierro’, my understanding of my work has deepened profoundly. I feel as though this concept was what I’ve been making work around for a while now, but I didn’t have the language for it. I recently have been having conversations with my mother, my aunts, and my grandfather. Much of these conversations were surrounding their migration to America. But through further inspection, it turns out this move toward the artificial American dream was a response to the job crisis as a result of the Trujillo dictatorship.

That was news to me, and then further contextualized what I’ve been thinking about in regards to fugitivity, and immigration. And then what ignited the move toward the states was the scarcity of available jobs/careers on the island, as a result of political corruption. I think about ‘destierro’ in all of this. The ways in which the trickle-down effects of political, and economic ruptures, dispossess specifically Black and Brown communities, in this false race for the American Dream. It also applies to the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, and how it has forced many people off the island, forced them to move to the states, and even face homelessness.

Yomaira mentions Jacqui M. Alexander’s work (Pedagogies of Crossing) in her essay with this quote “Alexander argues that people in exile/diaspora “ have grown up metabolizing exile, feeding on its main by-products --alienation and separation” She asks us to think specifically about the position of being “African American and exiled on the spot where one is born. To be Caribbean and exiled on foreign soil produces a longing so deep that the site of neglect is reminiscent of beauty”. Here she underscores the ontological and phenomenological aspects of being exiled and dispossessed in multigenerational contexts” I felt particularly understood towards the end of this essay where Yomaira states “Across these works, the act of remembering and awakening the memories of home/lands, land practices, and resistance to uprooting are tools of resistance against ‘destierro’.

Recently I was commissioned by Fire Island Residency to do a series of performances for their Juneteenth festivities. I performed some of my new work entitled ‘Falling so fast”. But I was also able to do an iteration of these ‘crop circles’ I mentioned. I’m thinking of calling these works ‘crossings’. My first iteration is below as photographed with my drone. This land installation is about 200 feet long and stretches from where the water kisses the sand to the start of the dunes. This work takes on a remedial approach to the effects of destierro. I found it particularly beautiful, reflective, and critical, for this work to be ephemeral. It develops this relationship of erasure with the ocean and the wind, and those passing through it.

After two weeks, this work completely disappeared. I think it really speaks to the politics surrounding fire island, in regards to stolen land… but also its ephemerality or disappearance is sort of embedded within the mechanics of queer spaces. And goes back to what we’re talking about in regard to fugitivity. Nonetheless, this work was made with my partner and lover Marques Rice - on an island where ‘wildness’ seems to be the undercurrent.

Documentation of “Untitled”, land art installed at Fire Island by Jesús Hilario-Reyes, 2021.

I recently attended a zoom panel discussion, with Yomaira Figueroa, Sarah Bruno, Anais Delilah Roque, and Beth Colon Pizzini entitled ‘Puerto Rican Studies: Current and Future Practices. Here I was able to directly ask Yomaira and Sarah questions in regard to all of this. I forget what I asked exactly but Sarah responded with such a beautiful answer.

“I’m thinking through bomba as a place of healing, particularly after the earthquakes and after Maria and within the diaspora where it becomes the Batey or the dancefloor/circle. It really operates outside of time and outside of pinned geographic space, and because it is built on care and intimacy, and its embodied long enduring history that-its within the body, it is within the music, it's in the rhythm, and it is inscribed into the Batey itself. It becomes a balm for destierro. For those who have been ripped away or born not knowing, knowing that you’re just never going to be able to see sovereignty.

And so in that way, I see it also akin to Blackness, and how it's centered in my understanding of Bomba as well as the Caribbean. And I see it more so with fluidity, Bomba is also a space where I see migration from the rest of the Caribbean, and it becomes this place in Puerto Rican history, where other people from- St.Croix, from Haiti they come to Bomba, because of its musical resemblance, and it becomes a place of welcome. And it really reestablishes Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans in the diaspora back into this Black geography that the United States has worked so hard to really distance us from”

When I tell you I was jumping in my chair!!! This is what it's about, this is how we’ve done it, this is how it's evolving. Every time I visit home, I go to Terraza de Bomba Bonanza, where they play bomba- which happens every Monday night. And this time it was located in La Perla, because of rigid covid safety protocols on the island. And La Perla is known for its low police activity given the layout of the land, it makes sense for the Batey to exist there right now. And I felt it...that feeling of liberation, healing, love, transcendence, community, care, that Sarah mentions.

But was also similar and reminded me of to the feeling I get from dancing for hours at raves specifically organized by Black and Brown Queer people. It is in these spaces that centralize queerness and Blackness, where these ideas surrounding blurring, subversion, and futurity, are embodied, practiced, and taught. It is important to understand that these places can and do exist and theory is important but the experience is even more felt within! There are also other things that come into the conversation in regard to raves, police, and the culture of social media, but sometimes and I mean that sometimes dance liberation is at the heart of it all.

JLB: I think there’s a flow between Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism and what Yomaira Figueroa is saying when she’s “destierro takes form as a dispossession of spiritual syncretic practices, alienation from the body, refusal of memories, and the physical deprivation of land. Across these works, the act of remembering and awakening the memories of home/lands, land practices, and resistance to uprooting are tools of resistance against destierro.” Could you describe the connections to land, transformation, and liberation in your current work?

JHR: My bad, I guess I already started going into this but yeah...

I think you’re right Legacy Russell and Yomaira Figueroa both identify ways in which glitch goes about subverting and nuance in relation to the systems at play. That being said, I think that land practices in relation to the work I’m doing feels most akin to the ideas brought about in Glitch Feminism and ‘Destierro’. Specifically, in Akin to the Hurricane and now currently in ‘La Brisa Va, La Brisa Viene’, they both employ this sense of mobility. Movement and masquerade are important in both of these works because of the ways in which they resist identification.

In Glitch Feminism, Russell states ‘Still, the machinic bias enacted by the panopticon of the mapping of the body through digital technologies is filled with hopeful holes, leaving us to ask: If a body is not legible as a body, and therefore cannot be read, will it be “seen”? Can it ghost, skirting the omnipresent digital eye? Failing recognition, can it successfully cease to exist?” And I’m beginning to grapple with disappearance, and ghosting in the coming scenes of ‘the breeze comes, the breeze goes’. But more so finding autonomy and liberation within it. Of course in strategic ways but...

I’m not sure if I fully agree that this ‘strategic illegibility’ is a move toward liberation, but it certainly is a move of resistance. I worry also, and question, if these modes of resistance are aforementioned akin to the modes of glitch Legacy, talks about? A part of me doesn’t feel that they are akin to one another. But more so adjacent.

Still from ‘La brisa va, la brisa viene’ Architectural Familial scene from animated short by Jesús Hilario-Reyes, 2021.

Nonetheless, liberation is at the spearhead of my practice, the feeling of it is the fuel for its trajectory. That, in tandem with the motif of transformation transpiring in my recent work--I’ve recently finished reading the Parable of the Sower diptych by Octavia Butler and have been so deeply moved. I found myself identifying and devoting myself to the Earth Seed ideology and seeing some of its teachings in my work. Specifically the central teaching of it; “All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.”

I’ve been sitting with this book a lot, and been thinking of how migration and autonomy play huge roles in the underlying motifs surrounding the protagonist- but also how these movements inform the characters growth through self-sovereignty, and finding belonging and meaning amidst the chaos.

I still struggle with ideas that tend to exalt Black people into something more than human, or mutated, or god-like as a means to elevate Black culture and our love for ourselves. I don’t agree with that notion, we should not have to do such things. That sort of performativity of success is toxic and deeply capitalistic, it leaves no room for the actual humanity of Black people. But I do find it empowering, to practice autonomy in the ways in which we conduct change--that is the groundwork of Akin to the Hurricane.

Documentation of “Akin to the Hurricane: Iteration 04” performed at ACRE Residency, photographed by Ryan Bach, 2018.

I’ve also been reading “The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis” by T.J. Demos. And he makes this beautiful remark that I found akin to this larger conversation about fugitivity, blackness, queerness, and liberation. It goes as follows,

“...migration identifies something uncapturable and unmeasurable, something ever mobile and unfamiliar. Far from designating a completely disempowered status, this approach sees migration taking on a certain agency, autonomy, and potentiality.”

He makes these remarks as a suggestion for the condition of being human, and ‘determining a politics of equality on that basis.”

JLB: To move from just these academic theories toward your lived and day-to-day experiences as a non-binary Black and Caribbean artist living in the diaspora, how might you relate to the idea of destierro “as a term that can capture the complex and multiple forms of dispossession and impossibilities of home for Afro and Indigenous descended peoples in the modern world”? Could destierro or this kind of embrace of the storm or becoming the storm in your work, “push […] toward liberatory practices, and map different forms of dispossession and resistance across intersecting identities.”

JHR: I think this embrace of the storm is absolutely a ‘push’ toward liberatory practices. In much of the rhetoric behind my work and even my collaboration with Leah Solomon's ‘In Hot Time’, this motif of vertical motion--this whirlwind, disorients or circumvents the viewer or at least seeks to. This everlasting state of motion is fugitive, and that fugitivity is in tandem with the nature of Blackness and Queerness. This whirlwind or the storm in this case becomes a symbolic space. To embrace the storm is synonymous with the blur. Fred Moten is probably one of my favorite writers but in his book Black on Blur, he elaborates,

“Disorder is our service, our antidote, and anteroom, our vestibule without a story. We can’t survive intact. We can only survive if we’re not intact. Our danger and saving power is an always open door. Our venue is mutual infusion, the holy of holies in the wall, glory in a kind of open chastity, where the explicit body reveals itself demure in disappearance. Unenforced, slid, venereally unnatural, and convivial, we claim slur against drill and document. Confirmation of the flesh is queer and evangelical”

I’ve held onto this statement for a while now and I think about this in regard to what Sarah spoke about - saying “Bomba is the balm to destierro”. That in these fractured, fragmented, bodies - disorder becomes that ‘push’ toward liberatory practices. That in the improvisational, sporadic, gorgeous, melodic, harmonious, chaotic space of the batey we find our antidote. That through dance, we’re able to disembody while simultaneously being embodied.

This embrace of the storm is definitely not about welcoming natural disasters and having that be the method of this idea. I firmly believe that climate change is an agent of white supremacy and that climate change disproportionately affects communities of color and lower economic status.

It's clear to me how the things that fall under this idea of ‘destierro’ have affected my individual self as well as my families and those around me. I mentioned before the political, governmental, and economic turmoil in our mother country was the agent that caused our migration. As well as how Hurricane Maria has affected my family and their relation to nature and land, also how it has affected much of the Puerto Rican population. Even in the most familial sense, there are forces far larger than the individual that urges us to move outward, away-- growing up queer in the mid-west with a heteronormative family and not having access to a community, will unearth you. And it did.

JLB: Among other things, Legacy Russell is really interested in amplifying the blurry lines between our IRL and AFK selves. From your unique intersection of identities and experiences with the performance and art world, as a DJ in the queer underground dance world in NYC, and from your own personal history in Milwaukee and Chicago. Can you describe the very real and felt a connection to community and the virtual world building you’re into or the digital worlds you’re creating and how they’re connected to your day-to-day of being Afro-Puerto Rican and non-binary?

JHR: After reading Glitch Feminism, I started to embrace more of the URL aspect of it all. I read this book while I was on a social media hiatus. At times and honestly as I write this I feel like the internet isn’t the most hospitable for me. I definitely think there are beautiful moments that happen in this space and it allows us to exist in multitudes, and that’s sort of the promise of the internet. It's an endless space that is bountiful with information and can answer many of your questions.

Still from the anime “Serial Experiments Lain” by Ryūtarō Nakamura, 1998.

But much of it is unfulfilling, I think we’re living in this dystopian cyberpunk reality that people want to reimagine time and time again-- It's as simple as this quote from Serial Experiments Lain, a sci-fi anime tv show from the late 90s where Lain, the protagonist who developed a unique connection to virtual reality network called ‘The Wired’, states the “internet is awesome, but you can’t download love”.

Sure this anime was made before the invention of social media-- I believe the failure of the internet is within its promise, we cannot expect this space to be boundless when it's so deeply intertwined with transactional relationships. It costs to have access, and within its commercial root we lose the capability to really transform ourselves, our interest becomes commodities - most things feel performative and tied to branding or some sort of revenue. Even if it's authentic, this is the nature of social media. Although we have these architectural in-capabilities -- the internet, especially for queer people does become or can become a space to extend community. The internet has probably morphed every bit of myself, it's so deeply communal that it can be very anxious.

Obviously, the internet/virtual world is massive and definitely has room for expressions of love. Recently, I organized a memorial celebration with Club Quarantine for my late best friend Terrell Davis. Who was and is one of the most recognizable and prolific designers working with CGI in the revival of Y2K aesthetics! Terrell would always be in Club Quarantine, (a group of organizers creating and hosting parties on Zoom, throughout the Covid-19 Pandemic). And I think about the conversations we had in regard to raves and parties organized by queer people of color and how he didn’t feel comfortable in those spaces. And that’s kind of what I hinted at before in how these spaces don’t exist in a vacuum -- that these spaces also deal with a status quo.

But during his celebration, I really felt this beautiful expression of love and community within my body. It had me tweeting, and yelling out loud IRL that “LOVE IS REAL '' in all caps because it felt so embodied. It felt like he was there with us, and made me think about how he will exist online even past his death. How the online or URL aspect of people live on in this stagnant state well after their death. But also how love can be shared through this space. I don’t know...I’m still processing the effects of the pandemic. I see how I’m contradicting myself...but I feel like that’s okay.

I truly believe that World Building is a practice of Love. A friend of mine shared with me a quote in the midst of all of this happening--that really gifted me with so much affirmation, and moved me to tears. I visit it quite often, this is from Valarie Kaur, a Sikh-American lawyer, and activist,

“Love is more than a feeling. Love is a form of sweet labor: fierce, bloody, imperfect, and life-giving—a choice we make over and over again. If love is sweet labor, love can be taught, modeled, and practiced. This labor engages all our emotions. Joy is the gift of love. Grief is the price of love. Anger protects that which is loved. And when we think we have reached our limit, wonder is the act that returns us to love”

Still from ‘La brisa va, la brisa viene’ This is where it happens scene from animated short by Jesús Hilario-Reyes, 2021.