Naming the condition and visceral experience of being severed from land, destierro is a Spanish term that defies translation. Decolonial feminist scholar Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez bends the term to map layers of dispossession wrought by colonialism and acts of reclamation forged through Afro-descendant bodily, spiritual, and land-based practices in the Americas. Destierro, in this formulation, attends to violence and land-based practices of resistance.

Poetic and reverent, the works in this exhibition make felt the personal, affective, and ecological registers of destierro from intersecting Caribbean and Black diasporas. Artists Patricia Encarnación, Paula Damasceno, and Ayanna Legros underscore how turning to Black Latinx ways of being help us unravel the overlapping violence of dispossession across space-times and trouble dominant narratives of gender, race, and landscape.