At CARVALHO, New York gallery in Brooklyn, Cuban choreographer and interdisciplinary artist Claudia Hilda turns the experience of migration into a moving meditation on memory and belonging. Her new installation, Neither Here, Nor There – The Migrant Body, expands the language of dance into a 24-foot projection where silhouetted figures emerge and fade, moving as memory does—sometimes vivid, sometimes lost.

In this immersive environment, choreography gives way to apparition. Figures rise from the dark, press their palms against a glowing wall, and dissolve back into shadow. Beneath them, a pool of ink-black water reflects their fleeting gestures, evoking rivers, seas, and the crossings that define so many migrant stories. A 40-minute soundscape weaves together interviews and testimonies from Latin American migrants across the U.S. and Europe. The work’s physical and sonic layers speak to the psychic weight of exile and the fragmentation of identity—what it means to inhabit the “in-between,” a space that is neither here nor there.

Claudia Hilda:Neither Here, Nor There – The Migrant Body, site-responsive video installation, CARVALHO, New York, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and CARVALHO, New York

Hilda, a former Principal Dancer with the Cuban National Company of Contemporary Dance, has spent the past decade translating the body’s unspoken history into movement. Her practice—shaped by recent residencies at BAM and Paris’s Cité Internationale des Arts—blurs the boundaries between performance, video installation, and sculpture. The result is work that is at once deeply personal and politically charged: choreography as cultural memory and as archive.

Her work represents the Cuban artists’ paradoxical world: the country’s state-supported arts education is among the most rigorous and respected globally, producing some of the finest dancers, musicians, and performers in the world. Yet this excellence is accompanied by severe scarcity—limited access to medicine, food, and basic resources—conditions shaped by decades of political regimes, economic embargoes, and global geopolitics.

All artists and their work—however original and unique—necessarily emerge from their times and collective circumstances. In Neither Here, Nor There – The Migrant Body, the gallery becomes a liminal space where the body remembers even if we try to forget. Here, movement carries the weight of displacement—and the hope of belonging.

Below are excerpts (lightly edited) from an interview with Hilda. Listen to the full conversation in the podcast above.

Cynthia: Can you speak to what first sparked the idea for this work?

Claudia: I think the idea really came from the process that felt almost like mourning and identity. I mean, when you migrate, it’s very similar to losing someone. You go through denial, anger, sadness, resistance, and then little by little you start accepting the new reality and you start surrendering yourself to this new environment.

You create a rhythm with it. And as migrants, I’ve been in constant negotiation with myself and my identity. A process that I already started living in London and I continue when I moved to New York. And it’s interesting because after maybe five year now I was ready to approach this experience, be open about it, and translated it into an art piece, and I guess with neither here nor there with the installation I wanted to speak about this process, about memory and displacement, that in between spaces here, their past present and what truly means living between that gray area.

Cynthia: It really comes through and merges choreography, sound projection in an immersive installation.

It’s like we walk into this dark cave and we see these bodies on another side of a screen reflected in a pool of dark water. It’s like very interesting, very surprising. Can you talk to us about your process? In creating the piece.

Claudia: I think there’s a thin layer between control and spontaneity in the work. The move to speak about the movement itself, there was no fixed choreography. Instead, I guided each performer through a process. Rooted in physical and emotional memory. Inviting them to recall sensations of crossing and transitioning, um, belonging.

I was really interested in activating those memories and lived experiences and through them, translating them into movements. So I wasn’t interested in choreography itself but more of a lived body movement. Something that felt more real. The movement had to feel lived and not choreographed.

Sometimes it’s pedestrian, sometimes chaotic, sensual. Fragile. So I filmed behind a translucent screen. That’s the way I found to approach to this idea of metaphorical and physical border and create this space between absence, time, memory. The gestures and the body movement of the dancers appear and the solve, just like memory itself.

And the work carries this anthropological dimension, not only through the movement, but through the oral history component. All the interviews we created, we interviewed a large number of Latin American migrants, not only in the United States, but in Europe, and they were all true stories.

It was so beautiful to reach out to this extended family and extended community and get to the understanding as performers and also as just humans, that our bodies are cultural bodies, right? So we carry not only our experience, but the memory of others in our own movement.

Cynthia: I think it’s so interesting the arc that your work is on, because your background, you were trained in Cuba at the Cuban National Contemporary School and a principal dancer in the company. And your work has been presented by BAM, Brooklyn Academy of Music and in Paris and this is so multifaceted, was this kind of mixed media work always a part of your dreams for yourself ?

Claudia Hilda:Neither Here, Nor There – The Migrant Body, site-responsive video installation, CARVALHO, New York, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and CARVALHO, New York

Claudia: I think with time I’ve been getting closer and approaching my ideal practice, let’s say.

Everything has informed the kind of practice I create today. The 10 years working for the national company and then the masters that I did in Arts and choreography in London, which really helped me to approach a more multidisciplinary practice since I worked there with opera singers, theater directors, I collaborated and assisted directing operas over there.

So I really connected with all this sense of cross pollination in arts of how theater, the visuality on stage, the music component, everything came together to create one piece and I fell in love with it and I, I always say I translate and I translate ideas that come to me and they always come to me in a different way.

And they demand to be brought into this world in a different medium, let’s say. So I try to be super disciplined and, and to translate them as close as they are. I felt at the beginning when you are a dancer, your mind is closer to the thinking of am I doing it right?

As a dancer, you pursue the technical aspect. You are pursuing perfection. But then I think also with age, you become more courageous. You are more brave to let that perfection go a little bit and come closer to the creator’s mind. I feel more calm letting that go and coming closer to intuition and everything comes together somehow, you gotta trust that process.

LISTEN TO FULL INTERVIEW ABOVE (PODCAST/VIDEO)

Claudia Hilda (b. Cuba) is a New York–based interdisciplinary artist working across choreography, performance, and visual installation. Her work explores migration, identity, and the politics of the body, informed by her decade as principal dancer with the Cuban National Company of Contemporary Dance and residencies at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Her installation Neither Here, Nor There – The Migrant Body is on view at CARVALHO, New York gallery through November 1.

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