Jaamil Olawale Kosoko
American Chameleon: The Living Installments
Co-Presented with FringeArts
DATES
September 09, 16, 23 | 4:00 PM PDT Reading groups focused on A Syllabus for Peace (capacity 15)
September 21 | 11:00 AM – 2:00 PM PDT American Chameleon: The Living Installments | View and participate through Discord.com | CLOSED CAPTIONING | TICKETS/WATCH
September 21 | 8:30 PM PDT American Chameleon: The Living Installments outdoor screening with Mobile Projection Unit. LOCATION | PICA, 15 NE Hancock St., Portland, OR
September 30 | 4:00 PM PDT Jaamil Olawale Kosoko public talk: Creating Chameleon: A Conversation on Grief and Healing | CLOSED CAPTIONING | TICKETS/WATCH
Description
American Chameleon: The Living Installments is a hybrid multimedia living artwork, instigated by Nigerian-American artist Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, that explores the ever-evolving ways in which digitality intersects with the fugitive realities and shapeshifting principles that Black queer people employ to survive and heal. The work also operates as a digital archive, a porous public performance in interactive pedagogy where Kosoko and collaborators seek to locate a space for healing both online and off. Kosoko and collaborators will host a series of events, including a film screening, discussion, and healing session, that aims to hold grief while also centering themes of liveness, beauty, humor, care, and joy.
The work operates as a flexible, digital commons. A pop-up community of organizers and practitioners centers adaptive interactive learning as a means of creating sustainable, multi-tiered networks of care. Occurring, in part, on the gaming platform Discord, The Living Installments is an experiment in creating a flexible space where Black voices feel comfortable thinking and speaking out loud. It’s a virtual venue for biomythographic* liveness conjuring chameleonic possibility and entanglement.
*“Biomythography” refers to Audre Lorde’s foundational work entitled Zami: A New Spelling of My Name published in 1982, which combines history, biography, and myth, and holds a literary perspective that serves as a guiding light for complex narrative storytelling rooted in a queer, Black self-defined, feminist imagination.
Director/Co-Host: Jaamil Olawale Kosoko
Sound Design: Everett Saunders
Assistant Director/Artistic Doula/Co-Host: Jennifer Kidwell
Co-Host: Ebony Noelle Golden
Systems Administrator/Archivist/Social Media/Usher: Nile Harris
Systems Administrator and Production Support: Vadim Nickel
Healing Session Facilitator: mayfield brooks
Video Projection and Design: Meena Murugesan
Film Co-Directors: Ima Iduozee & Jaamil Olawale Kosoko
Film Editor: Alexis McCrimmon
Artist Bio
Jaamil Olawale Kosoko is a Nigerian-American performance artist, poet, and curator originally from Detroit, MI. His creative practice draws from Black study and queer theories of the body, weaving together visual performance, lecture, ritual, and spiritual practice. Recent awards include a 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Choreography, 2019 NPN Development Fund Award, 2019-21 Movement Research Artist in Residence, 2018-20 Live Feed Artist at New York Live Arts, 2017-19 Princeton Arts Fellow, 2019 Red Bull Writing Fellow, 2017 MAP Fund recipient, and a 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Fellow. His works have toured South Africa, Europe, Canada, and throughout the US including at The Centre for the Less Good Idea, Fusebox Festival, PICA, Tanz im August, Moving in November, Within Practice,TakeMeSomewhere, Brighton Festival, Oslo Teaterfestival, and Zürich MOVES! among others. Kosoko is the author of Animal in Cyberspace and Notes on An Urban Killfloor. His poems and essays have been included in The American Poetry Review, The Dunes Review, The Broad Street Review, among others.
Program Sponsorship
American Chameleon: The Living Installments is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by EMPAC / Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY; the New York Live Arts Live Feed Residency program; and the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University, in partnership with Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), Tanz im August/HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Züricher Theaterspektakel, and NPN.
Additional support for The Living Installments was made possible by PICA and Fringe Arts. New York Live Arts’ Live Feed Residency program is made possible with additional support from the Joseph and Joan Cullman Foundation for the Arts, the Mertz Gilmore Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council with special thanks to Council Member Corey Johnson, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, the Jerome Robbins Foundation, the Fan Fox & Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, the Scherman Foundation, and the Shubert Foundation.
American Chameleon: The Living Installments is also made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Additional development support for Chameleon was made possible, in part, with commissioning support from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, through the Movement Research Artist-in-Residence Program, as well as the Bates Dance Festival, Gibney DiP, pOndersoa, D.O.C.H., Within Practice (Stockholm), the Centre for the Less Good Idea (Johannesburg, South Africa), PassaPorta International House of Literature (Brussels), Studio 303 (Montreal), the National Center for Choreography (Akron, OH), and Red Bull Arts Detroit.