Such a great conversation with Sofía Córdova (She/Her/They/Them) up at Soundcloud. We talk about her work Echoes of a Tumbling Throne (an excerpt is embedded below), the dangerous inequality perpetuated by the tech industry, Her project "A Body Reorganized", which considers Sanctuary Cities, the history of the term "Sanctuary", and the humans affected by these policies. We have a full-on Star Trek tangent, and get into her band XUXA SANTAMARIA's label Ratskin Records, and raising a tiny human in 2020.
Born in 1985 in Carolina, Puerto Rico and currently based in Oakland, California, Sofía Córdova @yagurmo-yal makes work that considers sci-fi as alternative history, dance music's liberatory potential, the internet, colonial contamination, mystical objects, and extinction and mutation as evolution, within the matrix of class, gender, race, late capitalism and its technologies. She works in performance, video, sound, installation, photography, and sometimes taxidermy.
Sofía received her BFA from St. John’s University in Queens, NY in 2006, and her MFA from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2010. She also completed the one-year certificate program at the International Center for Photography in New York in 2006. Her work includes performance, video, and installation. At the center of her most recent investigations is pop music as it relates to the marginalized communities -Caribbean immigrants, blacks, gays, etc– who found solace in its myriad genres. Her work draws from the conventions and pictorial language of mainstream music videos, while creating a narrative surrounding specific issues of identity politics. Córdova is interested in how the space of the dance floor, the space within the length of any particular song can be a liberating space where the identities we’re bound to. To that effect, Córdova recorded a concept album made under the pseudonym XUXA (pronounced ChuCha) Santamaría in an attempt to participate in that tradition. She has performed at SFMOMA, SomArts and Galeria De La Raza among others. Her work has been exhibited at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, AMOA/Art House, Southern Exposure, Queen’s Nails, The International Center of Photography as well as other venues internationally. Her work is part of Pier 24’s permanent collection.
She is one half of the music duo and experimental sound outfit @xuxasantamaria XUXA SANTAMARIA
Excerpts from Echoes Of A Tumbling Throne (Odas Al Fin De Los Tiempos) 5,6 +7, 2015, by Sofía Córdova for Anomaly #27
