Jesús Hilário-Reyes: Dissolving Notions of Group and Individual

In a video call conversation with Hilário-Reyes, we agreed that queer nightlife is capable of producing an environment where notions of individual and group are dissolved, establishing a place of belonging precisely where borders are blurred: “blur as a space to feel belonged to”. Firstly, because dance floors are dark, hazy and strobe-filled places. The presence of smoke machines and lighting systems creates an environment that enhances anonymity, moral disinhibition and collective pleasure. Furthermore, it is fundamental to the “poetics of nightlife”, as Hilário-Reyes describes it well, that sound fills the space in a hallucinatory way—creating spirals and vortices that rise and fall, like hurricanes—so that the fusion of bodies is provoked. Finally, it’s important that the introduction of extreme sounds, like sirens, provokes a feeling of collective liberation. Hilário-Reyes explains that the occasional insertion of alarming, “beautiful and grotesque” sounds serves to create an apex within a more prolonged sonic temporality, like that of a DJ set. 

Hilário-Reyes is a resident DJ at Nowadays in New York, under the moniker MORENXXX, and combines performance, installation, objects and expanded cinema in their artistic practice. They recently completed their MFA in sculpture at Yale, presenting the exhibition Slip Index (2025). The exhibition transports elements of rave culture to the environment of the white cube, exploring collective memory and the absence of sound, a fundamental component of parties. By transporting elements from clubs to art exhibition spaces, the artist presents an environment where collective memory, “the ghosts and the aftermath ideals” are conjured. Although the exhibition makes references, more or less explicitly, to rave culture, it transcends this theme as it combines religious elements and aspects linked to Puerto Rico, Hilário-Reyes’ homeland.  

The work Nowadays (2025) is a dance floor that was temporarily installed in the nightclub of the same name. People danced on it, leaving marks and smudges on the surface. Afterwards, Hilário-Reyes removed the floor along with all its traces and placed it in the gallery’s exhibition space. In A River Opens Up Into Many Windows (2025), Hilario-Reyes superimposes grates commonly used as containment gates for disasters, producing an effect he describes as “overlayed ornamentations”. In another work, entitled Dishonest Dancers, strobe lights and smoke are activated every thirty minutes, evoking the devotional and ritualistic nature of raves. This title was inspired by a religious painting that the artist found in a church in Puerto Rico, in which figures perform a liturgical dance. In the work titled Holy Ghosted (2025), the roots of plants living in mangroves mix with parts of distorted church organs, blending natural and metallic materials. Between the sacred and the natural, Slip Index is converted into a silent dance floor, where human artifacts haunt this world, pointing both to its end and to its resurgence. 

In dialogue with queer and Black radical thought, and with evident ecological concern, Hilario-Reyes challenges conventional notions of individual and community, aesthetics and politics. In relation to the Afro-Caribbean thought of Edouard Glissant, it presents a spirit of mobility related to archipelagos and a theory of opacity through the blurring and nebulosities of electronic music raves. In dialogue with the ideas of Legacy Russel and Esteban Munoz, it points to the fabulatory capacity of queer bodies in relation to traditional political organization, suggesting a queer politics that emerges from the dissolution of individual identities. By mentioning, in our conversation, the book Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler, Hilário-Reyes signals how times marked by inequality, economic collapse and extreme climate change demand the reinforcement of collective interdependencies. “What touches me, touches others” repeats the character of Lauren Olamina in the science fiction novel. Through an interdisciplinary practice, which they prefer to call antidisciplinary, they assume the structural limitations of the field of art and music and states: “I can do all of it”. They emphasize, however, that “music is the key path for these formations”.   

Guilherme Ferreira (Rio de Janeiro, 1996) is a researcher with a master’s pursuing his doctorate in Communications and Culture from the University of Rio de Janeiro where he studies Contemporary Art and Ecological Thought. He is a member of the Anthropocene Commons research network and a visiting scholar at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. He also works as a designer, writer, educator, independent curator and member of the Brazilian artist collective Acta.

Translation: Zoë Perry