Migration in Dialogue – Xenoduo
Miguel Alejandro Castillo and Xinan Ran: Xenoduo. Courtesy of the artists and More Art.
Xenoduo is a creative collective formed by visual artist Xinan Ran (b.1994, Inner Mongolia, China) and choreographer-performer Miguel Alejandro Castillo (b.1993, Caracas, Venezuela). They met through a study abroad program in high school, and their friendship blossomed into a long-term artistic collaboration when they first started bringing projects to life in 2017. Since then, they've explored the concept of diasporic imagination, folklore, and cross-cultural homemaking through installation and performance.
Last year, Ran and Castillo were selected to work with More Art, a NYC-based non-profit producing socially engaged public art. The duo is now presenting an installation titled A Mobile Home in Sunset Park, drawing attention to the complex US immigration system, offering, in their own words, “a literal and metaphorical entry point into the current migrant crisis.” The multi-functional structure, on view from September 14th through November 2nd, highlights the challenges faced by asylum seekers in the US, especially those pursuing Temporary Protected Status (TPS).
Xenoduo spoke with Mariado Martínez Pérez about migration in the US and how they see the futures of their respective home countries. They also address the underlying aggressiveness in the application process for different types of visas, how dehumanizing it can feel, and how to fight this feeling through a committed, community-focused art practice.
Xenoduo. Rendering of A Mobile Home installation. Courtesy of the artists.
MARIADO MARTÍNEZ PÉREZ: Can you share some background information on your separate journeys, emigrating from your home countries to pursue an arts career?
MIGUEL ALEJANDRO CASTILLO: I grew up in Caracas, Venezuela in a very large family. My parents were artists at some point, so I grew up with that sensibility around me. As a teenager, I joined a theater group focused on discussing and untangling taboos for kids—topics like divorce, fighting, death, or queerness. Later I got a scholarship to go to a Canadian high school, where I joined the theater program. The scholarship program was called United World Colleges (UWC). Schools promoting peace and sustainability would gather students selected by national committees worldwide and offer a full scholarship. When I went to Middlebury College in Vermont, I discovered dance. That was pretty affirming of the path that I was being drawn to.
XINAN RAN: I am from mainland China. Miguel and I actually met at the same school in Canada. It was a two-year program where you sort of mingle with everybody and form your ideas of where you are in the world. It was when I realized I wanted to do art. There, I also discovered theater production and set design. In undergrad, I experimented with visual arts, 3D, environmental design, and the concept of scalable projects that can be collapsible into smaller pieces. This interest in portability comes from having to move all the time in New York, thinking about how to make a big thing smaller so it can be packed.
Miguel Alejandro Castillo. Photograph by Maria Baranova. Courtesy of New York Live Arts.
MMP: When did you start collaborating?
MAC: I have always admired Xinan. When I first visited her art studio in Canada, I remember seeing her drawings, and she gave me a copy of this woman with braided hair on a bike [laughs].
XR: That was my RISD application! They asked us to draw 12 bicycles!
MAC: When we moved to the US, I would come to visit her in the city. Xinan helped me do the set designs for both my undergraduate and graduate theses. For her graduate thesis at Hunter, she asked me to be a performer to activate her art installation.
From there, we realized we had actually been collaborating for many years, so we sat down and came up with Xenoduo. We were both grappling with this idea of migrating, asking questions like: “What makes a home home? What are the things that we miss? And where is the place for nostalgia?”
XR: Although we specialize in different areas, our shared interest in exploring migration allowed us to pull resources together and helped us grow our network to build our portfolios. The topic turned out to be very interesting to explore.
Xinan Ran (right) during her project Soil-Sand-Selfie, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
MAC: The migration focus has long been embedded in each of our artist statements. Xinan's thesis at Hunter explored the perspective of a Chinese worker confronted with American values and consumerism, dealing with the relationship between “the other and the norm.” My own research at that moment was, and still is, about what happens to culture when it migrates—understanding diasporic imagination and what happens in the future with the things we bring with us.
MMP: A Mobile Home, your installation in Sunset Park, is literally connected to the migration process and visa applications.
MAC: Exactly. I was reflecting on the experience of applying for TPS (Temporary Protected Status) and getting rejected. It honestly is a dehumanizing application and brought up so many questions about what I'm prioritizing.
The following year, I applied for the artist visa, which Xinan was also applying for, and we both got accepted around the same time. Once again, we were on this same trajectory, and having a friend to go through it together was great.
Our O1 applications looked very different. I'm a freelance dancer and theatermaker. I have so many little gigs, and you have to present a plan for what you will do. I ended up gathering 26 letters—11 letters of endorsement and 15 letters of work intention. I reached out to my community, and I still owe a thank you email to many who helped me. Truly, helping someone with their O1 is a statement of solidarity, belief, and trust in their work. It takes time to get to know the person and say: “Yes, I support this human staying here so they can still make art.”
XR: I've been on the F1 visa forever and applied for grad school to stay in the US. I chose the longest graduate program available. Of course, I was questioning myself: “Why am I trying so hard just to stay?” Then I realized it’s because of the community that exists here. We are lucky to still have the privilege to choose to stay.
I started learning about what the O1 was at the end of undergrad and was like, “Oh, I should already start!” I reached out to six or seven different lawyers and got turned down so many times. If I didn’t have the press talking about my work, they couldn’t help. I realized I had to pivot a lot of my projects towards that direction. Instead of doing studio-based projects, I pivoted more towards: “How can I get press? How can I make a project that involves more people?” It felt the process was not about merit, but about press and publicity.
Miguel Alejandro Castillo and Xinan Ran’s collaboration for the scenic design for We imagined something different, 2022. Courtesy of the artists.
MMP: Did you ever think you were compromising your work because of this?
XR: I wouldn’t say so, but it pushed me to be very out there. If I were a US citizen, I probably wouldn’t be making work with the same intensity I am now. I don’t think it’s a bad thing, but I also don’t have a choice.
MAC: Also, what brings us here is the community. The communities I have found in the US are quite remarkable. And the intellectual and cultural discourses are really exciting. In Venezuela I wouldn’t have the possibility of making work at the scale that I am imagining and doing.
MMP: That brings me to a very timely question—regarding the current situation in Venezuela, how are you feeling? And what would be your message now, as someone who left Venezuela, to the people who are seeing the situation from the outside in other countries?
MAC: I feel like shit. That's the reality. But I’m still very hopeful. We're still in days that are decisive for what’s to come in the country. And I'm hopeful because everything and everyone is interconnected. We feel that we're isolated from these issues, but we're actually very much part of them. The Venezuelan community in the US is huge because we have a gigantic diaspora. The diaspora is still happening and ongoing. And with this election, I think it will continue.
I have always been somewhat critical and thoughtful about my political understandings and opinions. And discreet, I think that is the word, discreet. But this time around, there's just no place for this oppression.
So please keep sharing. We're all in it together.
MMP: You described the TPS as a “dehumanizing” process, and you mentioned in another interview the importance of the language used in visa applications. Could you expand on that?
MAC: Language is a tool that helps us create the realities we exist in. Language defines culture, and culture defines language. They are constantly interacting with each other. In the TPS application, the questions are just very criminalizing. I’m asked if I’m a terrorist, but I am not asked if I came here to make art, whereas in reality, migration is a natural process of being a living creature on this planet. It’s what all species do. They move from place to place. As a dancer and choreographer, human-made limitations on mobility have been something quite ridiculous to wrap my head around.
There's so much that can be dissected about the language. The way we ask newcomers to a country sets a tone for how they perceive themselves inside the new space.
Xenoduo. Rendering of A Mobile Home installation, focusing on changing the language used on visa applications. Courtesy of the artists.
XR: For people who have to apply for visas, we get used to filling out all kinds of forms. If you have a US passport and can easily travel, you don't even need to know your passport number. I know my passport numbers by heart, and I know how important my passport is. It’s like an extension of my life. People who have not experienced the difficulty would not understand.
MMP: Any advice for someone going through these application processes?
MAC: Ask for help and keep going. Try to flip the power dynamic as much as possible. Use it as an opportunity to build and assess your portfolio.
XR: When you have the choice, see it as an interesting challenge instead of a responsibility that you have to fulfill, because the stress is not good for anyone. I feel like if you apply for the O1, you need to get into the mindset of “I'm doing it because I love it.”
MMP: With migration at the center of a lot of political discussions leading up to the elections this year, have you reconsidered your artistic career in this country?
XR: Compared to China, the US has a bigger and more established art scene. And to put it very kindly, democracy in China is limited. When I considered US politics from afar when I was in China, I could see that imperfection. But the type of freedom that people still have in their hands here is so much greater than what anyone in China would have.
MAC: The election is not shaping the way I perceive my artistic path. But I know it will shape the content of my work. Different political scenarios will produce different materials for me to work with, just because I am an individual existing inside a system, and my work tends to be always related to that system. Depending on the results of this year’s elections, I might need to be elsewhere, not by choice, but out of necessity.
MMP: Could you tell me more about how you developed A Mobile Home together?
XR: I think we were literally talking about homes. I was thinking about my childhood home and wanted to recreate that. Miguel kept mentioning that he wanted to do a project about TPS, to make a difference, to provide support for the public, and to critically re-examine the process.
So we thought about creating a sculpture that would work as a stage and have a message. We’ve built a very versatile structure. The whole thing is collapsible, in order to be helpful when you have to move.
MMP: With public art being accessible to everyone, how would you see the public interacting with your piece?
MAC: We imagine it as twofold. There will be the people who come and are like: “What even is TPS?” In that case, the installation would have a more didactic relationship with the viewer by providing information about TPS and providing an entryway for those unfamiliar with the concept to learn more. This city is made up of immigrants. Many of us came here very recently, and some date back generations. They may have forgotten that their ancestors, who were immigrants, were probably also signing documents at some point.
On the other hand, I'm hoping to just bring some levity to the process. I have this impulse to performatively mock—to make fun of politicians and of the language being used. I believe this can change the dynamics of how we view ourselves inside the system.
A Mobile Home is on view in Sunset Park from September 14th to November 2nd, 2024. There will be other migrant-related activations throughout October.
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This interview was edited for length and clarity.
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