Give Me Your Warmth, by Joseph M. Pierce

Photo by Jeremy Dennis

Give Me Your Warmth
by Joseph M. Pierce

IV Castellanos, Leche Hervida
JACK, Brooklyn
March 2023

Give Your Warmth

I am sitting in a plush chair as IV Castellanos pulls out a canister of white powder, alginate, they tell me, to cast my hand. They take a healthy scoop, add water, and pull out a power tool—a drill fitted with an electric mixer. Vroom Vroom. Tap. Vroom Vroom. Tap. Tap.  

I’m sitting at this table, my right hand covered in seaweed goop, wrist bone just peeking out. Castellanos tells me: “it won’t cure right away. Your warmth is what makes it solid”. Warmth is what we need to cure—to become solid, to sit in solidarity, in the conversation about our bodies in relation. 

They tell me about their callouses. How hands mold themselves, become part of the tools we use. And I think of my mother, a physical therapist, whose hands have healed so many people that she now has carpel tunnel and has to wear a brace to work. “Who heals the healer?” they remind me. 

We talk about family members and the strength of our bodies. The scars we bear. The memories each one carries. I tell of the time I almost lost a finger when it got stuck in the auger attachment of a tractor when I was drilling post holes for a fence. Castellanos tells me of their love of shapes, playful renderings of objects, objects that take on new meaning once they leave your grasp. They tell me about care. About touch. 

Duplicate

I went to see Leche Hervida on March 17, 2023, the first of a two day run at JACK in Brooklyn. I enter the theater and notice my hand sitting on a table along with several others. Though I recognize this hand as my own, now that it has left my body, rendered independent in its casting, I cannot seem to believe it was ever part of me. 

Duplication is not the same as mimesis, though it shares a common desire of repetition. To duplicate is to create that which is like something else. Like, but not the same. The copy, the double, is not what it copies, but it yearns to become that original object. 

Cast a shadow, I think to myself, and perhaps this is not just a figure of speech. How does one shape the evanescent? Things like memory. The memory of a song your father used to sing. The memory of your childhood bedroom. The memory of yourself before you were you. Is that not also a form of duplication?

It makes me wonder: is it that this work shows the desire of duplication in its materiality, its raw, carnate, repercussion? Or does it reveal the futility of a search for a non-existent origin, this world being made of copies of copies, always already palimpsestic, resonating with a desire that knows no origin, and yet, which is itself a desire for a return to that impossibility? 

“There is a duplication that never really casts the truth,” Castellanos had told me. It never really manages to coalesce into the original referent, try as it might. I recognized that hand on the table, but not as my own. I think to myself: that is my father’s hand, not mine. 

Leche Hervida

The title of the performance, Leche Hervida, literally means boiled milk, but also refers to a nickname that Castellanos’ father was given as a child. It explores intimacy, memory, and the resounding effects of intergenerational relations. The work is adept at generating moments of identification, asking the audience to hold fragments of memory, a matrix of belonging that reverberates in time. 

The stage is illuminated by a DIY chandelier made of aluminum clamp lights. Castellanos strides in with a large black cardboard square and places it underneath the lights. They unfold each of its four sections to create a mat on the floor. One at a time, they place a small circuit at each corner.

The artist emerges again from backstage wearing a lacrosse helmet and face guard covered in plaster. The chilling effect is tempered by a song they hum, an Andean melody, as they kneel on the mat. The song’s echo fades and they take a hammer from their pocket and start chipping away at the plastered mask. The sound of the hammer against plaster takes over the room. Shards of this mask break free, little by little the artist’s face slowly becomes visible again, their body surrounded by debris.

They return backstage and again emerge, this time with their arms fitted inside an angular body cast that pushes against their stomach. Each arm is held at a slightly different angle, creating an awkward silhouette. The cast is painted a flesh tone, as if an exoskeleton. Castellanos labors to pull a flashlight from their pocket and place it on the floor. They roll on the ground and with their feet shine the light on one of the circuits—now the purpose becomes clear. The light triggers a switch and the same song they had been humming earlier is played by this tiny speaker. They roll again and their feet shine the light on another corner, this one plays a voice message sent by a relative. 

Then they start to rip the cast. In their struggle to break free, we sense the transformation of a body, the becoming, that is encumbered by the cast. Or perhaps it is some form, some memory, that is enlivening itself to the possibilities of what lies inside. We remember how to become more than what we are through song, through touch. In this struggle, we witness the singular becoming multiple. 

Wrestling with this mold, eventually Castellanos shines the flashlight on the remaining two circuits, completing the cycle. Each of these circuits plays a specific tune or field recording. Castellanos would later explain to me that the first was “Way ya yay” by Los Kjarkas, a popular Bolivian folk band. The second is a recording of their tía, the matriarch of the family, responding by voice message to a text Castellanos had sent in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. “I can’t read English anymore, but you know how much I love you,” their aunt replies in Spanish. The third is a recording of their father teaching their niece to sing the popular children’s song “Un elefante se balanceaba”. The fourth is that same niece singing “You Are My Sunshine” to Castellanos’s father. Together, these songs are intimate glimpses into the artist’s family life. They mark specific moments of struggle and give shape to the vulnerability of loss. After suffering a serious injury, their father may no longer be able to sing the song he once taught others. The recordings reflect challenging family situations, moments of rupture, and yet, also provide an opening to tenderness and joy. I can’t deny that when I heard the voice of a child singing “You Are My Sunshine,” I recalled my own childhood, when my mother would sing that to me. I can’t deny that this memory aches inside me, a yearning that I cannot quite articulate, but which I recognize in the layered textures of Leche Hervida. 

Finally, Castellanos breaks free of the cast. The sound of ripping this material, this replica, lingers in the room. They bring a wooden box to the center of the stage, stand on it, and slowly unscrew each of the lightbulbs that have been hanging above. Once each one is dimmed, they replace the center bulb with a red light, a flood of scarlet upon their face, cascading over their body poised on this box in the center of the stage. Time stands still. We exhale. 

We remember. 

Leche Hervida is a work that takes core concepts like touch and memory and pushes them to the limits of meaning. We are asked to bear witness, yes, but also to remember what it was like to inhabit a body that was perhaps not our own; we are asked to hum along to the melodies of a song that only exists in memory. We are asked to let this reminiscence take over, to bear its weight, feel its contours, and then let go. In that release, we find the bodies around us. We find ourselves in relation.