Jaamil OLAWALE Kosoko (NG/US, 1982)
Residency period: September – November 2022
While in residency at La Becque, I focused on research and development for my (chrysalis) project. This took the form of doing embodied practice with guest artist Luara Raio whom I invited to assist me in developing movement and audio/visual elements for the project. I also began sketching storyboards for the project and edited video.
Finally, I hosted a salon between an international ensemble of artists on site which delved into topics ranging from dramaturgies of care, displacement, and home. Through the practice of sharing space, a group of Black artists, scholars, doulas were able to safely convene, conjure, and reshape dimensions of time through processes of radical tenderness, deep listening, and intimate acts of compersion. Included in the salon were nGblk, Alicia Mendy, Luara Raio, Nes Sin, and myself. — Jaamil Olawale Kosoko
Jaamil O. Kosoko is a multi-spirited Nigerian-American poet, curator, and performance artist who grew up between Detroit, Michigan and Natchez, Mississippi. Their work is rooted in embodied ritual practice, poetics, Black critical studies, and queer theories of the body as a means to conjure and craft perpetual modes of freedom, healing, and care when/where/however possible.
They are the recipient of several awards and fellowships, including a 2020 Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a 2020 NCCAkron Creative Administrative Fellowship, the 2019 NPN Creation & Development Fund Award, a 2019 Red Bull Arts Fellowship, a 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Choreography, a 2017–2019 Princeton Arts Fellowship, a 2018 NEFA National Dance Project Award, and a 2018-20 New York Live Arts Live Feed Residency.