Cosmogram 0 (2024)

ATAKPA and The Fugitive Griot
KCAI Artspace “Material World” 19 September - 09 November

“...a collaborative cosmological initiation rite with syncretic roots in West African and fugitive Black cosmologies, spiritual traditions, and liberation practices...”

Asemic Writing: an experimental poetics (2023)

“...a poiesis that honors the methodologies, memories, ideas, and symbols that comprise our lived experiences, affirms our artistic intution, and uplifts imagination and relationality as potent sources...”

Learn more.

Ephemeral Ecologies

Lawrence Arts Center, 2023, June-August
Burlap, cotton fabric, raspberries, turmeric, spinach, coffee

“Over the course of ten weeks, Liberty Memorial Central Middle School seventh-grade students studied poetry and visual mark-making with artist Rae Atakpa to create a collaborative textile inspired by the AIDS Memorial quilt and Freedom Quilts of the American South.”

Hellinsia homodactyla (2023)

Hex keys, low voltage copper wire, journal wire, wire hanger

“...there is hardware
(industry, automation, mechanics)
dowsing rod / wishbone, plastic kin
conducting chemicals. eye, colored
woman (cyborg), remove my IUD
six weeks before Roe v. Wade is overturned...”

the parable (2023)

Thank you Octavia Butler, Dr. Tanya Washington, and Kaw River.

Seeds in order of appearance: Eryngium leavenworthii, Chasmanthium latifolium, Monarda fistulosa

3RD EYE MSK (2022)

Lentils, split peas, black-eye peas, amethyst, embroidery floss, fleece

“The weight and potentiality of legumes, the conductive ward of amythest, and the unifying stitch of embroidery channel the divinity and transcendence of ancestral dreaming. Holistically, the mask object implicates protection and rest within/despite racial-capitalist exploitation ...”

scription (2019)

Built-in webcam footage, 00:01:05

“...in their attempts to defy our watch, and collapse
the nonexistent boundary between public and private,
they are often witnessed...”

Included and accompanied by poem in FITS: a biomythography.

Igbo Landing (2019)

Video ritual, 00:08:32

“...it is pouring rain and i am barefoot. i run over and over again for an hour. the cornfield is swampy, i slip and step in sow thistle.
i think, in my long dress, about how this running felt two centuries ago...”

Included and accompanied by poem in FITS: a biomythography.

q.doc trailer (2018)

Documentary, 00:08:17

archival footage of midwestern queers and a mundane winter—
on being a living self at the end of the world.

echoeeeeeee (2018-2019)

Digital performance, 157 images and captions

longform, transtemporal poem,
an ode to finsta and feral internet kids

Queer as Politic (2018)

The Table Podcast

“We talk about the madness of March, queer as a politic, what we love about being black and the joy we get to share in this space!”

rachel j. atakpa (1999 — ) is and changes.

rachel j. atakpa (1999 — ) is and changes.

rachel j. atakpa
(1999 — )
is and changes.

rachel j. atakpa
(1999 — )
is and changes.