Devika’s work emerges from a concern for justice and a desire to heal and transform embodied systemic oppression. The aim being self and collective empowerment. She thus views her artistic processes as resistance praxis: a space for resilience where notions of care, support, codependency, vulnerability, pleasure and healing are centered and form the main conditions for constructing processes of transformation and its embodiment.
Mainly creating work within a queer intersectional framework, she uses performance art and language as entry points into understanding how hegemonic technologies of power shape bodies, times, spaces and their interrelationality. Striving to translate the unexpressed desires of predecessors, ancient rythms and queer futurities into prefigurative politics and a poetics of change.
Devika is currently based in Amsterdam and will graduate in 2022 from the School for New Dance Development (SNDO). Next to graduating she also holds the position of research fellow at If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part of Your Revolution (AMS). Besides her artistic endeavours, she contributes to community work and activism through foundations and organisations catered to the LGBTQIA+ communities of colour in the Netherlands.
Website: www.devikachotoe.com
Instagram: @devikachotoe
Facebook: Devika Chotoe