Performance | Spätschicht x Ligia Lewis
Invitation to Rant
Navild Acosta, Justin F. Kennedy
Navild Acosta, photo: Gabriella Achadinha / Justin F. Kennedy, photo: Sofía Obregón
For Spätschicht x Ligia Lewis, artists Navild Acosta and Justin F. Kennedy accepted an invitation to perform a rant.
Taking Ligia Lewis’s exhibition Ligia Lewis: I’M NOT HERE FORRRRR... as a point of departure, Navild Acosta and Justin F. Kennedy have been invited to engage with and expand upon the performative potential of the exhibition’s title.
Navild Acosta’s performative work CLAPBACK Method explores the power of Black asses to shed our colonial oppressions and jettison evil trolls. How can the expectation of dying young be overcome? How can we shift the earth’s gravitational field? Can bodies condenscent surveillance tech? CLAPBACK Method draws on Acosta’s solo performance CLAPBACK (2016), inspired by the rich legacy of club culture and Afrofuturism, and invites the audience – as witnesses – to reflect on solidarity and collective consciousness.
Following CLAPBACK Method, Justin F. Kennedy responds with an open-ended, performative rant – an answer, a reaction, a shift in perspective that ultimately stands on its own, existing without a fixed purpose. After all, it comes down to: “I’M NOT HERE FORRRRR...”
Navild Acosta is an artist born in New York who has been living in Berlin since 2017. As a Transgender Non-Binary, queer Afro-Latinx 1st Generation American, his practice is deeply rooted in world building. Navild’s work has been published in TeenVogue, VICE and Paper Magazine, among others and has been shown at institutions such as the Ford Foundation, MOMA, Performance Space New York and New York Live Arts. His multimedia works, often created in collaboration with Black artists and collectives, propose alternative, reparative economies. Navild also offers professional training on structural racism and is a professor of time-based media and performance.
Justin F. Kennedy (JFK) is a community dance/vocal artist, teacher, DJ and dramaturg from Ay Ay (St. Croix, US Virgin Islands), based in Berlin. Kennedy’s practice spans performing and visual arts, incorporating choreography, vocalisation and contemporary ritual and pursues transformation and hybrid forms. In this context, Kennedy creates speculative operas, collages, films, cyphers, workshops, zines, interventions and music, among other things. Kennedy just premiered the latest work Apocalypso (2025) at Sophiensaele Berlin and is currently a visiting professor of choreography and movement research at HZT Berlin, SNDO Amsterdam, Bard College Berlin and USC Kaufmann School of Dance.
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