Carvalho announces its first solo collaboration with Cuban choreographer and multidisciplinary artist, Claudia Hilda, with the opening of her latest performance work, Neither here, nor there – The migrant body. Translated into the digital realm, and projected across a 24-foot installation, Hilda’s choreography summons stories of migration and separation, suspended between the untenability of here and the impossibility of there. Hilda’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery opens the evening of September 12, 6 – 8, with the artist in attendance.

Neither here, nor there – The migrant body is an immersive installation in which spectators traverse the length of an illuminated wall, their movement shadowed by the gradual emergence of silhouetted figures behind its surface. At times a single body materializes; at others, multiple forms drift together in disquieting concert. Their gestures — at once delicate and insistent — reach outward as if to breach the partition, to press a palm against its resistance, or to signal across its opaque divide. These elusive interactions evoke recognition sought yet deferred. These apparitional figures, dissolving almost as they appear, speak to the precariousness of memory. The bodies move as memory moves: sometimes searingly vivid, other times receding, never wholly still. They carry the psychic weight of dislocation and exile, and the inward strain of holding fast to what cannot — or should not — be surrendered. Neither here, nor there – The migrant body becomes a liminal chamber in which memory, time, and presence converge.

The projected bodies move through a meticulously devised choreography, a cyclical interplay of dance and innate gesture that unfolds with a measured, poetic cadence. Through this lexicon of movement, human histories are inscribed into the architecture of the space. The wall becomes both surface and threshold: a symbol of division, a site of exclusion and demarcation, but also a membrane of the invisible threads that keep us reaching toward one another. Beneath the projection, a reflective floor gestures to the sea, rivers, and other bodies of water that migrants must traverse, extending the work’s language of thresholds into one of passage and crossing.

Accompanying the projection is a forty-minute sonic composition drawn from interviews and narrated testimonies of Latin American migrants across the United States, London, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. These voices recount not only the crossing of geographical borders, but also those that are linguistic, cultural, and political. They speak of fear, longing, and resilience carried in the body, of dwelling in multiplicity — what writer Gustavo Pérez Firmat has called the challenge of living in the hyphen — a space that is neither here nor there, but one of perpetual transition. Entirely in Spanish and presented with subtitles, the composition preserves the intimacy and musicality of the original language while extending its resonance to a broader audience.

Most of the performers filmed for this work are Cuban — some now returned, others having emigrated and building lives abroad. Joined by friends from New York, they form a collective body that carries both personal histories and shared values, inscribing migration as both individual passage and communal experience.

In charting the fragile tension between recollection and oblivion, disappearance and endurance, the installation confronts the paradox of return: the irreconcilability of going back, and yet the persistence of what refuses to vanish. Ultimately, Neither here, nor there – The migrant body invokes our collective instinct to connect and to belong, to span the fractures that separate us — not only from one another, but from our present selves and the memories of what we have left behind. Within this space, the impossible is momentarily made manifest: the impulse to touch what is gone, to remain who we are, and to carry the memory of others in the movement of our own bodies.