PUBLICATIONS
BLACK BODY AMNESIA
PUBLISHED 2022 BY WENDY’S SUBWAY, NYC
Blending poetry and memoir, conversation and performance theory, Black Body Amnesia: Poems and Other Speech Acts enlivens a personal archive of visual and verbal offerings written and organized by jaamil olawale kosoko. Inspired by Audre Lorde’s concept of biomythography, kosoko mixes personal history, biography, and mythology to tell a complex narrative rooted within a queer, Black, self-defined imagination.
SYLLABUS FOR BLACK LOVE
PUBLISHED 2021
This project seeks to subvert and reclaim, in a performance context, the roles and rituals of the classroom with practices such as the design and distribution of syllabi as a means to connect people to decolonialized knowledge typically cast out of academic hierarchies. The work aims to draw attention to how one might look inside in order to gather personal frameworks of knowledge. It questions the linear, acquisitional, and measurement-focused trajectory of westernized knowledge production and embraces a process of being a teacher/nurturer to oneself, learning and teaching as a cyclical, rhythmic, healing act. I’m curious to share what is possible for the syllabus once freed from academic rhetoric and allowed to travel towards home, towards self love.
CHAMELEON: A SYLLABUS FOR SURVIVAL
PUBLISHED 2020, EMPAC
What are the agreements, and complex systems of care needed to realize alternative methodologies for negotiating this moment of global crisis?
Is it even possible to create an invitation that portals us through such nascent space?
CURATING LIVE ARTS: CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES, ESSAYS, AND CONVERSATIONS ON THEORY AND PRACTICE
PUBLISHED 2019
Situated at the crossroads of performance practice, museology, and cultural studies, live arts curation has grown in recent years to become a vibrant interdisciplinary project and a genuine global phenomenon. Curating Live Arts brings together bold and innovative essays from an international group of theorist-practitioners to pose vital questions, propose future visions, and survey the landscape of this rapidly evolving discipline…
CRISIS IN THE GALLERY: CURATION AND THE PRAXIS OF JUSTICE
PUBLISHED 2018
What does a radically inclusive curatorial practice look like? How does this practice become a lived experience that moves beyond the predominantly white cultural institutional frame?
Throughout my travels in Europe, Canada, and the United States, I have consistently encountered a lack of supportive inclusionary cultural spaces for individuals who identify as trans*, queer, disabled, Black, indigenous, and/or people of color. Performance curators and audiences alike ask me the same question in regards to creating more inclusive spaces for people who exist outside the sphere of white cisgender hetero-normality and ability: how do we begin to break the border between art and culture to allow diverse audiences to feel more welcomed inside predominantly white spaces?
BLACK MALE REVISITED
PUBLISHED 2015
As a Black male presenting person working inside the creative spheres of experimental dance, moving image, performance art, and curation, I know we are not endangered. There are plenty of Black men making internationally competitive works. The problem is the lack of distribution of these works due to unconscious cultural bias or what the scholar Joe R. Feagin calls “the white racial frame.” He defines it as “an overarching worldview, one that encompasses important racial ideas, terms, images, emotion and interpretation. For centuries now, it has been a basic and foundational frame from which a substantial majority of white Americans – as well as others seeking to conform to white norms – view our highly racialized society.”
4 POEMS
Two souls collide in a moment perfected by grace,
a super power some of us only know as God.
With an untethered intrepid stride, they collide
leaving no room for chance, no space for mistakes.
Consider for a moment, this moment: the parents
of their parents and then their ancestors all linked,
all impeccably placed in time. Of course,
this union specified before you or I could even see,
could even breathe… Soul and soul collide
and so the result can only be love: a blessing
as ancient as the dinosaur, older than the world,
shattering dimensions and science – a blessing
traversing the heavens, floating up like prayers, like feathers.
Close your eyes and witness how angels fly all around us.
DANA MICHEL IN CONVERSATION WITH JAAMIL OLAWALE KOSOKO
PUBLISHED 2013. MOVEMENT RESEARCH - CRITICAL CORRESPONDENCE
Is there such a thing as a Black abstractionist aesthetic in live performance? Can the Black body exist in live performance without the concern of euro-centric or westernized legibility? How might the Black female body behave in the public domain when void of the need to be stereotypically attractive in the eyes of the hetero-masculine gaze?
All of the above questions seem to be thematic concerns of Dana Michel's Yellow Towel, which opened this past January in New York City as a part of performance curator Ben Pryor's American Realness Festival at Abrons Art Center…
HOMEBODY
The performative and interactive publication for the 10th edition of zürich moves!