Sofía Córdova
Artist Statement
I am an interdisciplinary artist from Carolina, Puerto Rico, with a focus on performance, music, video, and installation. The specific interests of my practice and how they manifest in the work vary greatly—in the past I’ve materially and conceptually employed pop music, science fiction, taxidermy, and prepper culture. My core interests are the future as a site for alternative histories, climate change and colonialism, the contemporary conditions created by late capitalism and its technologies, and the mythic and mystic mechanisms our species employ in making sense of the unimaginable. While remaining ambivalent about whether humans can be redeemed and survive in the face of a changing Earth, I see the future as a site of possibility, despite the dystopian undertones of my work. I ask: what forms of liberation lie in clearing the decks and starting anew for those bodies whose lives have historically been predicated by the violence of marginality?
While At Headlands
While at Headlands I hope to continue my recent explorations and research into zoological and botanical resistance to the environmental ravages of the human hand. This work will imagine a future landscape not of doom but where flora and fauna flourish, thriving on radiation and evolving in spite of harsh conditions. Through these new works—chiefly taxidermy and sculpture, accompanied by video, music and performance elements—I aim to decentralize our anthropocentric visions of the future, to suggest that beyond merely surviving, nature may carry on and even thrive regardless of the outcome for our individual species.
I believe this approach is key to having a broader and stranger imagining of what human life can be. I believe a great deal of the failings of our current sociopolitical space are thus because what empire and power have imagined for us is wholly insufficient. It is my hope that this work performs as a mild, if at times incoherent and psychedelic, corrective to these historical ills.
Selected Videos
