Lauren Levin Writes About Artist Sofía Córdova at Open Space

In a new essay published at Open Space, Lauren Levin writes eloquently about the artist Sofía Córdova's work. "When I was finishing up my studio visit with artist Sofía Córdova at the Headlands Center for the Arts, they (Córdova uses both she and they pronouns) asked if I needed to take a candid picture; I wondered about 'needed,' and Córdova explained that since both my previous columns had featured informal portraits of the artists, they’d assumed it was a requirement of the gig." From there: 

I appreciated the exchange particularly because, considering that the first two photos were (in my mind) more happenstance than requirement, it struck me as expressing something about form: how difficult it is to evade, and that a pattern (in this case, two snapshots) seems to tug at us psychically (and sometimes physically: I’m thinking of the way our bodies respond to a beat), requesting its own continuation.

Córdova was right of course in that, intentionally or not, there was a pattern evolving; I was just slower than they were to notice it, which doesn’t surprise me since their own work exhibits a virtuosic and kaleidoscopic handling of form. Córdova is a world-builder, and their work, like the forms they seems particularly compelled to draw from and push against — science fiction, pop music, and styling — has a Gesamtkunstwerk quality, arranging patterns at different scales and from different genres to create the effect of vast spaces, new universes.

When I first met with Córdova to discuss their work, they were finishing up their project BILONGO LILA: Nobody Dies in a Foretold War, a performance that brings together several years’ work with science fiction and performance tropes. BILONGO LILA draws its audience into a world 1500 years in the future; it’s dystopian in its portrayal of a complete ecological collapse, but equivocally utopian in its imagination of new possibilities the current order’s destruction could offer to othered, subjugated, or subaltern bodies. In this liberatory vein, Córdova’s work offers creative participation and a degree of autonomy to its participants (in BILONGO LILA, a cohort of “dancers and musicians who are of color, and/or identify as women, trans, and/or queer”) and loving, textured attention to bodies in their particularity, difference, and transformation.

Read more at Open Space.