Fannie Sosa

A collaboration between artist Fannie Sosa and filmmaker Marilou Poncin, Cosmic Ass celebrates twerking, a danceform that originates in the black ‘bounce’ scene of 1980s New Orleans.

As the artist twerks in front of a waterfall, gyrates on a seascape and thrusts her buttocks on the Milky Way, Cosmic Ass traces the danceform’s history as a counter-colonial method of resistance for diasporic communities in America. Remembering the use of twerking in fertility rituals, Sosa frames the danceform as a liberating act, a way to take control of reproduction.

This is one of three works exploring reproduction and technology selected for the exhibition by Helen Knowles, curator of the Birth Rites Collection at King's College London .The Birth Rites Collection is the first and only collection of contemporary artwork dedicated to the subject of childbirth, hosted by the Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery and Palliative Care.

Image: Still from Cosmic Ass, a short film by Fannie Sosa and Marilou Poncin. Photo: Sofia Senna

About the contributor(s)

Fannie Sosa is an award-winning afro-sudaka mover and shaker, artist, and activist. They have been creating and sharing pleasurable anti-colonial strategies and mixed-media knowledge packages for 10 years. Sosa wrote A White Institution's Guide for Welcoming Artists of Color and their Audiences (WIGWACATA) in 2016. The guide has been utilised by over 200 cultural institutions around the world to better their equity practices.

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