niv Acosta
“… in employing the popular contemporary black dance as a durational technique, Acosta seems to conjure at once the movement of the black body in real life. The repetition dismantles the commonly held notions of the dance to show the multiplicity of meaning that lives in the black body. How it can at times evoke fantasy, move in a way that empowers and sometimes summons racism that invites violence. The entire performance shows the black body in spades.”
Antwaun Sargent for VICE
Artist Statement:
One of my core missions as a native New Yorker, Black Trans queer artist and organizer is to create representation of under represented communities through my work. As an Afro Latinx artist I believe that reparation must come from the institution under many shapes, one of them being the redistribution of rest, relaxation, and down times. After learning who benefits most from restful sleep and down time myself and collaborators are creating interactive surfaces, performances, talks and workshops for a playful approach to investigate and practice deliberate energetic repair . Reparations must be economic repair as well as generations of energetic repair. My vision is to impact inclusion, representation, and liberate economic and energetic reparations for myself and my Black indigenous Queer Trans Disabled Migrant community. Through making artistic interventions which challenge institutional to structural policies rooted in white cis-gender hetero-patriarchy, we will gather our people and amplify the voices of the most vulnerable among us. I am building a legacy for my many children to thrive within, this includes; multiple sovereign spaces of unbothered rest, creativity & leisure, building easily recyclable mutual aid business models, creating a permanence by establishing large teams of solid accomplices who are willing to liberate reparations for Black & indigenous, sustaining long term relationships with funding & arts institutions who see the benefit in maintaining support for Black & Indigenous creators, & fostering the leadership of our community leaders by passing the mic and re-patterning perception of the other in the global social imagination.
Artist Bio:
Navild Acosta is a Disability Futures Fellow & Creative Capital Artist as well as Multi-award winning and internationally acclaimed multi-media artist and activist from New York. He studied dance and choreography at the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance (NYC) & at CalArts (Los Angeles). His intersectional identities as Transgender, queer, and Afro-Latinx 1st Generation American have continuously inspired his community based work. Navild’s work and thought leadership has debuted in various Institutions & publications internationally including Matadero Madrid (ES), Tate Modern (GB), Tanz Im August & Kunst-Werke Institut (DE), Weinerfestwochen (OS), The David Roberts Foundation (UK), Mousoturm (DE), Museum of Art and Design, Miami (USA), The Kimmel Center (USA), Human Resources (USA), MOMA PS1 (USA), Studio Museum (USA), New Museum (USA), and McGill University (CAN), among many. Navild has collaborated with Alicia Keys, Fannie sosa, Bearcat, Pxssy Palace, Ms. Boogie, Monstah Black, TYGAPAW, Lyle Ashton-Harris, Ralph Lemon, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Deborah Hay & Andrea Geyer. Navild’s current projects include Black Power Naps in collaboration with sudaka artist Fannie Sosa, a multi-purpose separatist organizing space with a focus on rest, restoration, rejuvenation, reparation and Black joy. Navild’s work spans across various media, all devised in collaboration with Black artists, which are all propositions for how reparative economies can better hold communities of color. Parallel to his artistic practice through his racial justice work he has provided Structural Racism & Transformative Justice training for Cultural Producers at Matadero Madrid (Spain), KW Institute (Berlin,DE), NYU Steinhardt, Vassar College and Movement Research (USA).
