Working in the Dark: Rafa Esparza’s El Hoyo

• In Event: Queer Art of Emergency: Racial Proximity and the Aesthetics of Repair

Abstract

In 2013, the Los Angeles-based performance artist Rafa Esparza staged “El Hoyo” at Human Resources Los Angeles. In this talk I unpack the haunting of this performance by violence and violation and read Esparza’s performative actions (which included forcing the audience to navigate the space in the dark) as a reparative action — one which folded the audience into that healing action. This essay draws heavily from psychoanalytic writing about groups, group encounters and vulnerability and pivots on hidden components of the performance which completed the work’s reparative actions.

Author

• Jennifer Doyle, University of California-Riverside