Tonight's performance is an activation of Gabrielle Civil's Say My Name (an action for 270 abducted girls).  Civil created the work in April, 2014 after the news of the kidnapped Chibok girls first emerged.  At that time, her knowledge of the individual names (and actual number) of the girls was incomplete. The repetition of the unnamed girl for her takes it beyond Nigeria and into the realm of lost black girls (and girls in general) everywhere in the world.

Gabrielle Civil is a black feminist performance artist and writer, originally from Detroit, Michigan.  She has premiered fifty original performance art works around the world, including a year-long investigation of practice as a Fulbright Fellow in Mexico and a trilogy of diaspora grief works after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Recent performances include Q&A (Eclipsing) (Chicago), a ritual of nest and flight (Toronto); and …hewn and forged…. (Salt Lake City). Since May 2014, she has been performing Say My Name (an action for 270 abducted Nigerian girls) as an act of embodied remembering. Her memoir in performance art, Swallow the Fish was named a “Best Non-fiction Book of 2017” by Entropy. In September, 2018, she will begin teaching at the California Institute of the Arts.  The aim of her work is to open up space.