Lauren Schell Dickens:
Sofía has generously agreed to answer some questions for us, but she's going to take a minute to switch gears. It's a very different mindset for an artist performing a work, versus talking about it, so we'll give her a minute.
In the meantime, please submit your questions for Sofía using the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen, and we'll get to the questions that we can. By way of introduction and while we give Sofía a minute, I thought I would give you a little bit of background on the project. And the idea for this project was hatched during the depths of 2020, when many people, myself included, felt uncomfortably unstable. All the norms of daily life seemed to have shifted, and every experience of art was mediated by a virtual platform, and they are right now. You think about online art exhibitions, recorded symphony performances and plays. So, I started wondering how an artist could make work that addressed this virtual translation or mediation within the form itself, while living in the middle of all of the limitations put upon an artist by the pandemic. So, wondering how these current realities impacted the artistic process. And Sofía brilliantly turned this prompt into SOBRE/On.
So, thank you for joining us again, Sofía, you can unmute yourself. And I want to start by thanking you for being so vulnerable with your work and willing to experiment with us. And maybe we can start by, can you tell us how you approached thinking about this project?
Sofía Córdova:
Yeah, I mean, I will say that it started in a way as kind of an inverse proposition, in the sense that something you and I talked about a lot was how early in the pandemic everything just felt like it pivoted into a digital mode, even when that wasn't necessarily the right vehicle. I'm thinking about exhibition making and programming, there wasn't any time to kind of reflect on the moment. And I sort of really resisted that for a while and by the time you and I were having a conversation, I felt like I was more in a kind of rhythm with my own making in the studio. And this became really exciting because it meant that I, because of my own kind of objections, I needed to create something that was specific to Zoom, treating Zoom as a material. And I think that that was sort of the underlying kind of architecture.
But I will say that in a lot of these, even though I write instructions for myself, they're really improvised. And I think that that's been met with sort of interesting kind of artifacts and in a way a collaboration with Zoom itself, because it shifts things so much just by what it's meant to do, which is not this. But that became kind of an exciting aspect of it as well.
Lauren Schell Dickens:
And thinking about, I mean, working with Zoom, so in your practice you perform live with an audience, as well as make videos performing for a camera. So, SOBRE/On kind of falls oddly between those two things. The audience is here, you can't see them, neither can I, you only see the camera. So, how did you approach thinking about live-ness via the interface of the screen?
Sofía Córdova:
Yeah, I think that while it is actually, I hadn't thought of it that way, but it is sort of solidly in between. It's also in a way, it pools together the most uncomfortable part of both, because live performance, there's an audience feedback. So even if it's obscure, experimental stuff, you can feel the bodies in the room, even if they're not swaying and dancing, there's an energy that's very real. And when I do video performance or performance that's deliberately to be processed through a camera and for a screen, there is this really big removal. The audience feels so distant at that point that it gives me kind of a freedom of performance.
And so being here, for example, last week's was really tricky because it felt, that one weirdly felt like the most vulnerable and then it was over. And then I couldn't, there wasn't the either audience feedback or, and again, feedback can just be sort of energetic, but it was sort of like I was dropped in the void, which is what usually happens when I perform for a camera. But I figured out how to feel good around that, whereas this was like, where am I? So it was really decentering, but it was in an interesting way. It made me really think a lot about, I had to really sit with that feeling and I think that writing for this context and learning each one sort of was a learning experience for the next culminating in this one. I had to kind of build it with this trust in an invisible audience, and that was a little scary. But I think ultimately for me as a process, it was really generative and productive.
Lauren Schell Dickens:
It's interesting, for me as a viewer watching it, the videos have been both strangely intimate and distant. So the first one, we see you sitting in your space and with the way the narrative was, it's almost as though we weren't supposed to be there like we were just watching you in your space journaling or something. But then the second one, the way you were literally an image in the performance space of the screen, so your video Zoom screen was one of the images that you were manipulating. It almost felt like you, the creator, at the time were not there. You were just one of these manipulatable things, like you as your own material kind of idea. So, I thought that was a really interesting way to work with this medium of Zoom that is both so distancing and so intimate at the same time.
Sofía Córdova:
Yeah, I'm glad that it became that in the accumulation of these, but it was important to me at the beginning when I knew nothing of what this experiment would materially look like or feel like by the end, that it would have some trajectory, even if those trajectories can kind of overlap and go in reverse or whatever. But just that I was in a sense coming closer to an audience in the process over the three that happened, but that there was sort of a built-in distance from the beginning. That this feeling of the camera invading the workspace or the studio space or the home space, in my case, because I live work, as you can hear. That was really important because I feel like I also wanted to address the ways in which Zoom and telecommuting and all of this has infiltrated everyone's lives. It's not just the art world that's gone into this sort of digital kind of panopticon, it's everything. And something that I just really resented that in the beginning, how the workplace just sort of pushed itself into my house and this all seeing eye was in my house.
And so, I wanted my sort of position to feel like it was sort of moving closer and farther and closer farther, until this last one kind of felt like I could really be present and combine the digital image and then an embodied performance. This was sort of the point of arrival.
Lauren Schell Dickens:
Yeah, I think this third performance and thinking about materiality was super interesting, in that what comes across to me is just the messiness of materiality. And not in a pejorative sense, but in a porous sense, that all of these things are just flowing in and out of each other with your projected computer screen and your dog. I don't know if you planned for your dog to run in.
Sofía Córdova:
She did great. We were worried she was going to bark, but she just did a little shadow puppetry for us.
Lauren Schell Dickens:
And then I mean, with your baby, and I don't know, as a mom myself, thinking about motherhood as material and the messiness of that is just so apparent in the work that you're doing. I think it's great.
Sofía Córdova:
And I think too, I mean, there's this very obvious juncture of those things where I just feel like every person I know who has children or works with people who have children, their kid, it's part of that invasion of the home space. And I feel like it's such a move, right? You have the kid coming, right? In the early days of the pandemic, there was that guy whose kids, it went viral, whatever.
The point is, it's part of this struggle that I feel is very, very real for a lot of us. There's this tension between this format entering our home space, and I wanted for this one to really court indeterminacy and improvisation and chance and just let the baby be in it and let the dog be in it, everybody come in, so that it could really mark this moment. I didn't set out to make pandemic art because I feel like we're going to be saturated with that when this is all said and done, but I wanted to make something that did reflect this struggle with this technology and how it's both helped us to kind of stay active in a laboral space, but also I feel like it's so intrusive and so ever present.
Lauren Schell Dickens:
Do you think these sort of... sort of rephrasing a question that we have about whether you'll continue to use this Zoom material after we go back or after in-person interaction continues? Or I guess even broader, whether this kind of porousness that you've been talking about, an invasion to take kind of the negative spin on that, whether that is going to continue to impact your work moving forward?
Sofía Córdova:
I mean, I feel like this was, I discovered a lot. I think that anytime an artist has to kind of throw themselves at new knowledge, there is a tremendous fear and mostly it's filled with failure, but there is so much to be gained from walking in uncertain territory.
So for me, I think that actually it was technologically very edifying. I feel like I will bring a lot into the work, maybe not necessarily literally using it as a communicative device. Hi, Cleo. But using it as a... It was really useful for me to think about images on images, really, that became really physical and really layered in a real way through this process. Well, everyone's coming back. Are you coming to take a bow? So, I think that that was a really good takeaway. I will say this, and I think that this is something that I want, it's important for me to say after kind of saying so many, having so many doubts about Zoom. Is that one thing that I think... That's what we were afraid she was going to do in it.
One thing that I think is really important to take away from this is that these technologies, as much as I'm struggling with them, and I will put the blame of that in the sort of work aspect of things, is that these technologies are really important in terms of accessibility and in terms of access. And I think that this time has been really difficult for a lot of folks, but I think that there's also a lot of folks that, I mean, can only speak to the art world, but I know so many folks that just cannot make it physically to every performance or every lecture or anything. And this has been incredibly useful and incredibly powerful in disseminating all manner of works and ideas to people that just because of accessibility issues are not able to participate more. And so, that's something that I really want to carry over from this experience. It may not necessarily be Zoom, but I'm really interested in what possibilities exist within the sort of broadcast framework.
And then the last thing I'll say about that is that it does remind me of something, just to not give Zoom all the credit, something that I really love, which is public access television. And this has kind of... The scatter shot of things that are available for you to watch and consume at any time is so varied now that it kind of has that vibe, and that's something that I wanted to bring into this. You're just sort of flipping the TV, that's not anything anyone does anymore, but.
Lauren Schell Dickens:
[inaudible 00:14:17].
Sofía Córdova:
In the olden day, it's 3:00 AM and you're watching public access and something miraculous and weird happens and it's sort of like, was I alone in seeing that, all of that? So I think that that's something that this reminded me of in a way that kind of spun this to be positive and not all about the eye looking at us.
Lauren Schell Dickens:
I mean, I definitely, especially during the first performance was thinking about cable access, late night, Wayne's World kind of references. And then I was like, oh, I dated myself just now.
Sofía Córdova:
I love public access, all day.
Lauren Schell Dickens:
With the technology, there's a question about translation and maybe related to the kind of inherent limits of the medium. So, working with Zoom for example. So we figured out that there are background filters to keep out noise, since it's a meeting software, to keep out some of the subtler sounds that you had in the first performance dropped, we didn't hear. Or the video in the second performance with your video screen, there's a looping delay. So, the words that you were saying weren't in sync with your lips as you spoke them, but I actually thought it was a really interesting way to visualize [inaudible 00:15:46] inherent in translation, or maybe inherent in delay, delays inherent in virtual communication. I guess, so within this project, is there a way that you thought about translation and delay in that sense through the medium?
Sofía Córdova:
I think that the way it started to, again, and this was because it's so cumulative, right? We were learning as we were going along but we had so many conversations about leaving those things as artifacts of this medium. And as I've had time to reflect on the first two specifically, that to me kind of became a really nice marker of actually the physical distance, because that's obviously not why it's happening, but it felt like it was akin to shouting to someone over a chasm and then an echo moving the sound across. So, it actually made me feel closer to an audience and it made this feel like what it is, which is performance, right?
I could have prerecorded these and let them happen, but I sacrificed a lot of the sort of technical pristine-ness that I would typically work with and then develop over time, to again, feel like it was risk-taking and also feel like whether I succeeded or failed, I don't know, but that there was an actual attempt at connection, because I do feel like that's one of the reasons this was attractive to me in the first place. How can I kind of rework this space to feel connected to people in a way that is just impossible right now?
Lauren Schell Dickens:
I think that's one of the really powerful things about the way you frame this project, that you didn't want to prerecord them and exert the same level of control that you usually use, although you use a lot of improvisation in your work, live, performance anyways. So, you're kind of someone who can let stuff go in some ways.
Sofía Córdova:
Totally. No, no, no, totally. But I think that that's true, but I always kind of feel like I can count... If I know the sound is going to sound a certain way and I know that the video is going to sync up. You know what I mean? These things give me a false sense of security and then I can kind of leap into the improvisation. Whereas this felt like every aspect was improvised, whether it was... like the last one, I used the screen share feature because it's the one thing I've used the most in my Zoom life, right? The screen share feature is, everybody's using it, but I wanted to complicate it for myself and again, kind of push at the edges of what it's meant to do, which is convey information clearly and succinctly. And instead, kind of jam it and throw as much into it as I could and see what started to happen.
And yes, there was some degradation as a result, but I think that that was also important to me in really not... If I was going to do this on Zoom, then I was really going to do it on Zoom. And so part of that was also using this, again, this technology which has a very specific objective, which is to help people chat with each other. And I wanted to really kind of break that, if you will.
Lauren Schell Dickens:
Yeah, I think that's, Zoom is a vehicle for communication. I think you also addressed really well in each of the three, going from maybe the most narrative or most articulate-able in words at the beginning, and then moving. And then to this third one was much more about sound and I don't know, guttural, emotive, this is what the moment is, this is the material. So, using a vehicle of communication to express something without words, I think was a really interesting way to end that.
Sofía Córdova:
And I wanted to move into that, because I mean, I knew I wouldn't be able to do that in the first one. Just because in the first one, I didn't know what was going to happen. I really didn't know what was going to happen. And so... [inaudible 00:20:14], you okay? [inaudible 00:20:19].
But I wanted to move into it also with my own comfort in this mode of performance. And so this one, because of the theme, but also because... Because as you now know, they each had a theme, but all the themes overlapped every time. With this one, I wanted it to be embodiment and I had to build to that. It couldn't start with that, even though there were sound elements and there were echoes of this in the first one. I really wanted this one to feel like fully using the space of this space and this space, and really fill it up. And I think that I needed to build to that. And materiality just felt like kind of the right place to park that, because for this, the materials as you saw were sort of amassing conceptually, but this one was like the body being with those materials and the struggle that it's been to produce and think and all of these things within the kind of constraints of the last few months, almost a year.
Lauren Schell Dickens:
Yeah, ongoing. Yeah.
Sofía Córdova:
Yeah.
Lauren Schell Dickens:
Well, Sofía, I don't want to keep you because I know how much energy that takes to perform and then to speak about it. So, thank you so much for thinking with me on this project. And really, I don't know, really taking it beyond where I ever could have thought someone locked in their house during a pandemic with a baby and a dog could ever take it. So, congratulations and thank you so much.
Sofía Córdova:
Thank you for the prompt. I would just be hating on Zoom and now I'm like maybe it's mildly worthwhile. No, I'm kidding. But don't spend too much time on it, people out there much.
Lauren Schell Dickens:
That's right. It's a beautiful day out.
Sofía Córdova:
Yeah.
Lauren Schell Dickens:
Thank you everyone for joining us. And just a reminder, if you missed any of the performances, they are all on a dedicated page on our website, and please, check it out. Thank you so much, and we will see you all next time.