My San Francisco is a new solo performance by Black feminist performance artist Gabrielle Civil.

Civil has premiered over fifty performance artworks worldwide including Black Weirdo School, the déjà vu—live and Jupiter. Her performance memoirs include Swallow the Fish (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2017), Experiments in Joy (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2019), (ghost gestures) (Gold Line Press, 2021), and the déjà vu (Coffee House Press, 2022). Each of her books, in its own way, is the performance of an archive—exploring how memory is embodied and personal experience becomes materialized.

“My practice—all of my work—is to create and contribute to an archive of Black women's creative expression. I’m so haunted by what has been lost. At the same time, we have to acknowledge that the archive is not everything … fundamentally, it cannot hold everything. I’m interested in that tension.” —Gabrielle Civil

My San Francisco will continue in this lineage, as Civil considers how SPT’s archive of books, magazines, and poetry ephemera has been a catalyst for her own understanding of San Francisco and found its place in her coming of age narrative. This original work will reckon with literary ambition, the power of friendship, sexuality, and lineage (on the page and in the body)

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This performance is the final event in Gabrielle Civil's five-part series Where Would I Be Without You?

The Lab
‍2948 16th St, SF