Interview with Sofía Córdova

Photo: Matthew Gonzalez Kirkland.

Sofía and I met on the first day of grad school. I was sitting alone in a dark auditorium amidst a sea of other first-day students, and then, suddenly, she was next to me. There, one of my life’s great love stories began. Along with a third member of our cohort, Rebecca, we found the kind of closeness that comes when each member of a group is inventing a new self at the same time. In a photography program that was dense with students and sparse with mentors, we became one another’s teachers and comrades. When our truly great teacher, Larry Sultan, was diagnosed with cancer in the summer of 2009, between our first and second years of the program, and died within several months, we drew even closer to one another, holding his words and presence between us like a shared trust.How is it that we have stayed so close in the decade and a half since, living in different states, managing our work lives and our small children? One reason is Sofía’s laugh, which is wonderful. Another is that I love listening to her speak on the phone, her Puerto Rican Spanish so fast and rhythmic that it sounds like a single word, the “s” dropped from the end of each syllable. A final rationale, I think, is an affinity in our political commitments, and the way those commitments have spilled over into our creative practices. Our methods and outcomes are different—Sofía is braver when it comes to material exploration, and willing to venture further from photography—but we share a foundational belief that a different, more liberated world is possible. Somehow, it was not until this conversation that I realized just how much our curiosities overlap: in decentralized movement leadership, in the mundane moments that constitute political organizing, in centering the role of imagination as a force of both artmaking and worldbuilding. Perhaps our friendship holds not only because of our shared desires but as a form of solidarity in itself.

Sofía’s recent exhibition at JOAN—her first solo, institutional project in Los Angeles—was materially dynamic. She engaged a variety of forms: painting, drawing, video, text, ceramics, taxidermy, and light. She included two video installations from her ambitious GUILLOTINÆ WannaCry series (2019–present) along with a newly commissioned installation. At its heart, the show contended with Indigenous resistance to colonial exploitation and erasure of both people and land. But its sense of imagination was so much bigger than that neat, historiographic sentence allows. Drawing from strategies of speculative fiction, Sofía insisted upon alternate readings of both the past and the future, braiding together recorded fragments (of the Sandinistas, the Black Panthers, and the Russian Revolution) with invented scenes: dancers speak without moving their mouths, actors embody leaves and seeds. In The Wreck and Not the Story of the Wreck, as across Sofía’s work, it all felt vivid and wild and a little dangerous, as if to ask over and over, what if things were different? What if that feeling of wildness was the beginning of making them so?

Carmen Winant: Because I’m also deeply into her work, I am aware that the title of your show at JOAN is from Adrienne Rich’s 1973 poem “Diving into the Wreck”: “the thing I came for:/ the wreck and not the story of the wreck/ the thing itself and not the myth.”¹ Why did you choose this specific part of this poem?

Sofía Córdova: What has always attracted me to Rich’s work is the way that she can hold the weight of political situations while holding the intricate emotional ways those same situations sit in the body. That is something that I’m always trying to do with my work. I was spending a lot of time with that book in general—Diving into the Wreck—but that phrase in that poem particularly jumped out at me because on the most basic level, on the sort of foundational seedling level of it all, it felt like it quickly elucidated what it felt like to grow up in a colony.

CW: Will you elaborate on that? You grew up in Puerto Rico and moved to the States when you were 15. So much of your practice, and life, are grounded in that experience and trajectory—not only growing up in a colony but observing how your colonial status is narrated from the perspective of the mainland.

SC: Exactly. The media-scape presents a tidy story of a colony and its collapse, most recently with the hurricane [Maria, 2017]. But that isn’t the reality of the wreckage, right? Something that I love about that poem is the idea of actually diving. There’s this idea of a diver going into a wreck underwater—I imagine darkness and a flashlight illuminating things in pieces. You never have the whole picture. I think that there’s something about my upbringing in this colony and then the [island’s] colonial status that felt like that image really resonated. The idea that we’re always getting a little bit of a picture, but that if you’re underwater living in that wreck, you know it really well, even without having to see it all. It’s more of a felt experience. From there, it became a phrase and kind of a mantra through which to look at how that foundational experience of growing up in Puerto Rico has colored how I look at everything.

CW: One of the major subjects of your work is Indigenous organizing and resistance to colonial order, with a particular focus on Cimarrónes’ resistance.²

SC: In Puerto Rico, we all grow up with this narrative of the three races—that we’re all “trigueño,” the product of Spanish, Taíno (Arawak), and African blood existing in harmony within each of us and the culture. As I came up within political circles that were actively fighting the U.S. Navy’s interventions in Vieques, for example, a sharpness started to emerge for me around that fiction. That led me to start to look at Puerto Rico and the Caribbean at large as this kind of unstable place that this narrative of colony has actually created.

So, [I began] not seeing [these histories] as a very tidy, linear, one- dimensional story, but rather an extremely complex and in some ways unknowable kind of network of positions. [It] taught me a way of being with history and politics and storytelling that is about a lack of linearity, or a lack of singular understanding. And I think that it’s important to [acknowledge that] as the door through which I enter the United States.

CW: It is so interesting how you answered that question about the impact of growing up within a colony —your response was ultimately to say that it taught something larger than a theme or a politic, something about how to read history and the uprisings that make it go.

SC: I think the moment we say we know how revolutionary struggle works is the moment we know it the least. What I’ve learned most about these processes is that, again, the way they’re historicized and taught to us is extremely simplistic. That’s why I am very invested in the future as being conversant with the past…looking at past revolution and past struggle as something that is indeterminate, as something that is messy. I’m looking at all of these positions as being part of the soup… [They offer the potential] to actually have true and kind of horizontal conversations. Otherwise we become too adherent to an idea of hierarchy.

Sofía Córdova, GUILLOTINÆ WannaCry, Yellow: Break Room (video still) (2019–21). Three-channel video with color and sound, TV stands, and ceramics, 25 minutes. Performances by Kevin Lo, alex cruse, Stephanie Hewett, and Sofía Córdova. Image courtesy of the artist and JOAN.

CW: Let’s talk more specifically about your show at JOAN. It is hard to describe neatly as it’s so materially diverse. There are multiple videos, some projected on makeshift screens and others appearing on monitors. The video work in the show contains text, audio, and dance. There are ceramics, there’s gel lighting, there are taxidermied birds, there’s graphite on canvas. You always joke with me about this, like, “I am a ceramic artist now! I am a light artist now!” But there is some truth to it, how open-ended your approaches can be.

SC: I think because photography is such an inherently technical medium, by the time I started walking away from it, I had become a very technically good photographer, right? So it was formulaic, it was mathematical. [But] I am interested in, within the art-making project, being surprised. And that surprise is really important because I think that’s where I learned the most about my own interest.

Even when I was making pictures, my research was never linear. I make [up] historical voices. I force them to talk to poetry. I needed a material engagement that could reflect that [process], which is how I started to work in video and performance. I was messing up constantly. But in every one of those errors, I was finding something new and exciting. They weren’t frustrating dead ends, but rather new openings. Maybe my medium is like…trying something new, you know?

[My practice] is never fixed. It’s in and of itself unstable. And that causes me stress sometimes, but instability is a really great place for me to work out of because again, the ideas that I’m working with do want to avoid fixity. The moment they become stuck into something, I think they become dangerous, because in the things that I’m talking about—which ultimately are liberation—I never wanna have a singular, authorial voice.

CW: Let’s talk about the two works in the show from the GUILLOTINÆ WannaCry series, Yellow: Break Room (2019–21) and Green: Savage Sauvage Salvaje (2022). Can you describe how they function? They have a deep emotional resonance, but I think it would be useful to set the stage first.

SC: These are a series of color-coded videos. Each color addresses a separate arm of this larger proposition: What are the gestational necessities for revolution? The reason that they’re color coded is because, once the series is complete, I want them to have an intuitive, synesthetic relationship to one another, rather than a chronological or linear relationship. This goes back to the idea of thinking through these processes as having organizational moments that don’t often make the annals of history—these organizational moments belong to women time, queer time, Black time, Brown time. These are the moments of meeting and struggle and discussion that again, don’t make the movie version of revolution.

CW: Color is so profound in the show. It really seeps everywhere, materially and immaterially. It is so interesting to think about it as another organizational system, and one related to how our bodies remember.

SC: I hope to open sensorial and relational pathways, to demonstrate that they are more available than we think…As Che [Guevara] famously said: “The true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.”³ Color is a way for me to coax emotion as a tool of collective struggle.

CW: The definition of feminism that I live by centers the role of imagination, insisting that our imperative is to believe that another world is possible, makeable. There is some element of fantasy that is necessary to world build. How do you think about the relationship of fiction to groundwork in your film Green?

SC: Green has a more straightforward relationship to color. Green as a color really speaks to the land. The colonial lens we look through is inherently tied to land, right? Particularly in relation to the Caribbean, which was a laboratory for the plantation system in the southern United States. The colonial project conflates our bodies with the land to render us extractable—a “free” resource. Green looks at the conflation of Black and Indigenous peoples as one with these other natural resources. While Yellow was extremely constructed and hermetic—a closed set—in Green, we move into the land itself. We’re so anthropocentric, so divorced from understanding the land, its methods, its seasons; Green manifests a struggle to re-tether.

CW: Can you talk a bit about building the script for Green? I am aware that it is rooted not only in the forest and the jungle, but also in the history of Indigenous and Black fugitive uprisings that happen there, in the United States and beyond.

SC: When I started working on the script, I was reading Luis M. Díaz Soler’s Historia De La Esclavitud Negra En Puerto Rico [History of Black Slavery in Puerto Rico] (1953). Again, these histories and legacies are complex and various. Our story is still narrated by European superpowers—in some sense, they still have us in a mental bind—which I think prevents organizing on a basic level.

The characters in the work are debating this position. In writing the script, I was thinking about everything from the Haitian Revolution to Captain Jack’s stronghold here in California—places where Indigenous and Black runaway fugitives were organizing against white colonial violence from within the land. The work moves forwards and backwards in time. Its references are historical and poetic; for example at one point the characters read from Alice Walker’s “Karamojans” (1968), which is the poem she wrote about a fictional African tribe as narrated by a white colonial-like framework.⁴ In this way, it interrogates the way that otherness is narrated by colonial powers.

CW: As we talk about the wilderness, I wonder if you could elaborate on the botanical and zoological elements in the show.

SC: Green is video that is split into three acts. In the first act, the characters each exist as non-human forms: One is a seed, one is a leaf, one is a rock. Climate change and anthropocentrism are part of this story. I consider climate change to be the direct legacy of racial capitalism, of its extractive colonial practices… I had become kind of fed up with human stories, and I was thinking about the ways that part of our problem [with] the climate crisis comes from us always seeing things through the anthropocentric vision of events.

We humans have main character syndrome; we think only of climate collapse for how it will affect us. I started thinking: What about viewing it through the lens of how it will affect anything else? A tree, a bird, a mountain? What followed were somewhat sci-fi ideas of mutation. I started thinking of mutation as another place where we can imagine liberation.

Sofía Córdova lives between Puerto Rico and Oakland and makes work that considers sci-fi as alternative history, dance music’s liberatory dimensions, and revolution. She works in performance, video, sound, and installation. Her work has been exhibited at The Whitney Museum of American Art, Tufts University Galleries, and the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, among others. She is a recent recipient of an Artadia and Creative Capital Award.

This interview was originally published in Carla issue 37.

Sofía Córdova, GUILLOTINÆ WannaCry, Green: Savage Sauvage Salvaje (installation view) (2022). Video, color and black-and-white; 34 minutes and 35 seconds. Original sound composition with Matthew Gonzalez Kirkland; performances by Rashaun Mitchell, Meg Jala, and Sofía Córdova; narration by Imani Mason Jordan. JOAN, Los Angeles, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and JOAN. Photo: Evan Walsh.

Sofía Córdova, Green is A Solace, A Promise of Peace (where small birds hide and dodge and lift their plaintive rallying cries) (detail) (2022). Taxidermied birds (doves, parakeets, and canaries); hair dye; brass; and birch wood; dimensions variable. JOAN, Los Angeles, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and JOAN. Photo: Evan Walsh.

Carmen Winant is an artist and the Roy Lichtenstein Chair of Studio Art at the Ohio State University. Her work utilizes installation and collage strategies to center modes of feminist exchange and social movement building, with particular emphasis on intergenerational and multiracial solidarity. She is a mother to her two sons, Carlo and Rafa, shared with her partner, Luke Stettner.

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