Rafa Esparza

My work is embedded in questions regarding ritual, identity, memory, and land. I attempt to inhabit moments in time inaccessible to me or inaccessible through performance and use my body to imagine, project, and create a space that can reveal the potential for a different now, a different future. I’m currently seeking to work outside of traditional art spaces. Places such as Elysian Park — a popular gay cruising site where I buried the lower half of my body into the ground, tied a noose around my neck, and for nearly 2 hours blew into dozens of clear balloons as a meditative gesture on manifest destiny — inspire me to create more work. My work responds to sites such that the people who routinely occupy them (in the case of Elysian Park, mostly Latinos looking for anonymous gay sex) become the intended audience for the work. I’m invested in continuing to work in public to broaden my audience to include communities that have also informed my work in other ways: people of color and lower working class people.