rafa esparza, photograph by Max Knight

rafa esparza
Sunday, June 1, 2025 | 2PM-5PM

With a closing ritual by meital yaniv and a participatory dance experience from Dance Church

rafa esparza (b. 1981, Los Angeles; lives and works in Los Angeles) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work reveals his interests in history, personal narratives, and kinship, his own relationship to colonization and the disrupted genealogies that it produces. Using live performance as his main form of inquiry, esparza employs site-specificity, materiality, memory, and what he calls (non)documentation as primary tools to investigate and expose ideologies, power structures, and binary forms of identity that establish narratives, history, and social environments. esparza’s recent projects are grounded in laboring with land and adobe-making, a skill learned from his father, Ramón Esparza. In so doing, the artist invites Brown and Queer cultural producers to realize large-scale collective projects, gathering people together to build networks of support outside of traditional art spaces.

The LAX Micro Fest is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, and is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture. Los Angeles Performance Practice is also supported, in part, by The Mellon Foundation, The Perenchio Foundation, and the California Arts Council.