rafa esparza is a multidisciplinary artist who was born, raised, and is currently living in Los Angeles. Woven into esparza’s bodies of work are his interests in history, personal narratives, and kinship. He is inspired by his own relationship to colonization and the disrupted genealogies that come forth as a result. Using live performance as his main form of inquiry, esparza employs site-specificity, materiality, memory and (non)documentation as primary tools to interrogate and critique ideologies, power structures and binaries that problematize the “survival” process of historicized narratives and the environments wherein people are left to navigate and socialize. esparza’s recent projects have evolved through experimental collaborative projects grounded by laboring with land vis a vis adobe, a labor inherited by his father Ramon Esparza, where the artist shares institutional space and resources to invited Brown and Queer artists and cultural producers. esparza is invested in working in the local geographies that are the Southwest including Mexico and Latin-America.
