Name: The Schomburg
Address: 2538 West Division Street, Chicago, IL, 60622-2806, US
Telephone: 3126468278

Experience the vibrant world of contemporary art at The Schomburg | Espacio de Arte Interdisciplinario in the heart of Paseo Boricua in Humboldt Park. Immerse yourself in a creative venture as we sample the creativity and rich artistic tapestry of Puerto Rico and its Diaspora.

on view-

RESIDUAL | Irse sin dejar rastro | To Leave Without a Trace

Co-curators, Brenda Torres Figueroa & Alejandra Rosa

Irse sin dejar rastro, ser materia, pero etérea, pintarse de noche, de sombra tibia, de silencio, de sin registro, de sin huella, de abre camino, de murmullo de orilla…

To leave without a trace. To be matter, yet ethereal. To cloak oneself in night, in warm shadow, in silence. To be unrecorded, unmarked. To carve a path, to be the

whisper along the shore…

Residual: Irse sin dejar rastro brings together a cohort of Afro-Caribbean performance artists whose practices navigate the intersections of memory, spatiality, and identity. Central to the exhibition is the notion of the body as both archive and cartography—constantly negotiating visibility and erasure. The showcased artists engage in performative acts that resist dominant narratives and archival absences, asserting presence in spaces historically designed to negate it. Whether through live interventions, recorded installations, or public conversations, each work maps the intimate terrain of existence under colonial, racial, and gendered violence. Thus, this project explores how performance can articulate the paradox of presence within invisibility.

Residual Irse sin dejar rastro invites audiences into a space of deep listening and witnessing. It asks: What does it mean to disappear without absence? How can the unseen be rendered legible through sound, shadow, and gesture? And what histories—silenced or submerged—emerge when the shore is understood not as a boundary, but as a transgeographical beginning?

Through its focus on land, memory, and Black embodiment in Puerto Rico and its diasporas, this project creates a transhistorical dialogue—one that resonates with both local urgencies and global conversations about race, migration, and survival.

By centering artists whose work challenges visibility on their own terms, the exhibition resists traditional archival practices and reclaims space for fugitive, intimate, and collective modes of knowing.

Featured: Sonia Báez-Hernández, Xavi Burgos, Javier Cardona-Otero, Helen Ceballos, Awilda Sterling-Duprey, Awilda Rodriguez-Lora, Alejandra Rosa and Brenda Torres-Figueroa