Sin’s Invalid Artist Performs Friday

Mark your calendars.  Everybody’s favorite gay holiday, Halloween, is fast approaching, and in all the hubbub of donning costumes, touring haunted houses, attending glamorous parties and dodging het tourists, you might miss groundbreaking performance artists Sins Invalid. Bringing the sexy back to disability, Sins Invalid’s Nov. 2-3 show at San Francisco’s Brava Theater, entitled An Unshamed Claim to Beauty in the Face of Invisibility, reclaim and celebrate the disabled body as beautiful and sexual.

Sins Invalid utilizes performance art, videos, spoken word, storytelling, song and visual media to re-examine sexuality and disability.  Founded in 2006, the annual event features a number of queer artists, including Solidad Decosta, a self-identified “intersexed femme dyke” who describes Sins Invalid as, “disabled artists speaking truths about their bodies and stripping taboos off of sexuality and disability.”

The 40-something multitalented San Franciscan describes herself as “an uppity Portuguese woman who isn’t afraid to claim her black Latina maternal ancestry.”  For this year’s Sins Invalid, she created a new piece exploring issues of identity and repression in the United State’s post-9/11 climate.
“Much of the work that we do in Sins Invalid is about raising up our voices, not just about our sexualities, but about our lives—our power, our beauty and our deepest passions—and letting the world know that we are alive, vibrant, amazing, sexy folks.”

The artist believes the non-disabled LBGT community shares commonalities with the disabilities community—including “the realities of our marginalized sexualities as oppressed peoples.”

A poet, musician, activist and video artist Decosta has created numerous experimental video pieces and was part of the collective behind 2003’s award winning documentary, We Interrupt This Empire, about the direct action protests that effectively shut down San Francisco’s financial district following the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

She has been a panelist at San Francisco’s ForWord Girls conference, and has produced five chapbooks of her poetry including the most recent, I’ll Eat You with my Teeth.  She also has an EP of experimental/ambient hip-hop and a CD of piano improvisations.

A frequent reader at San Francisco’s Small Press Traffic events, Decosta will join the organization and other California College of the Arts alums Friday, Sept. 28 as part of the school’s Centennial Reading and Celebration.  Housed on the campus, Small Press Traffic (sptraffic.org) supports small press publishers, writers and their readers through its publications, conferences and reading series.

Being a performer, Decosta says, allows her to “connect with others in a way that releasing a book of poems doesn’t. There’s a lot of overlap between my work as a poet, performer and musician, though—it’s no accident that most poetry was originally set to music; so much of poetics has to do with rhythm, phrasing, cadence and so on.”

“My work is driven by the collective desire for liberation of all peoples,” Decosta notes.  Often blending her art and activism, has facilitated performance workshops at San Francisco’s CELLspace (cellspace.org), the Mission district arts warehouse that serves at-risk youth and local artists, providing space for art, education, performance and community building.  

“We’re quickly becoming a police state,” the poet worries. Fear of that potential motivated her involvement in leading writing workshops for incarcerated youth in the Bay Area.

“There but by the grace of God…go I. The most damaging thing about being incarcerated is the lack of voice.  You keep your sense of self up, you can survive. You don’t? Well, it’s up to chance. Writing is a way of helping in that process.”
For five bucks ($5-10 sliding scale) you can catch Solidad Decosta at California College of the Arts’ Centennial Reading & Celebration, this Friday, Sept. 28 at 7:30 PM in Timken Lecture Hall.

Trans writer, Jacob Anderson-Minshall, co-authored Blind Leap, the second book in the Blind Eye Mystery series, available in October. Contact jake@trans-nation.org or visit Anderson-minshall.com for more information.