Sof铆a 颁贸谤诲辞惫补: The Wreck And Not The Story Of The Wreck
JOAN presents The Wreck and not the Story of the Wreck, the first institutional solo exhibition in Los Angeles by Oakland- and Puerto Rico-based artist Sof铆a 颁贸谤诲辞惫补. The exhibition features two video installations from the artist鈥檚 Guillotinae WannaCry series, along with a newly commissioned installation with sculptural and text-based works. 颁贸谤诲辞惫补 makes work that looks to science fiction as alternative history and considers climate capitalism鈥檚 deep entanglement with colonial erasure. The presentation at JOAN centers on her recent work on revolution鈥攂oth historical and imagined鈥攁sking what are the gestational conditions necessary for collectively imagining and constructing a liberated future.
Guillotinae WannaCry is set in the near future and owes its title to the 2017 ransomware attack and its aptitude in naming a spirit of malaise. The series conceives of revolution as a speculative and indeterminate process. Through absurdity and nonlinearity, each act makes a different proposition for finding new ways to revolt by moving away from an authorial voice, and unsettling the notion of progressive time by creating synesthetic relationships through color.
The first act, Guillotinae WannaCry: Yellow: Break Room (2019-21), resists historical tellings of revolution as individual-led events and looks instead at the collective to better understand who and what constitute organizing. Through a multichannel video work and a color-coded environment of readymades and objects, the work calls forward a near future where various possible ruptures鈥攆rom global uprisings to the destabilization of governance and a series of climate-related events鈥攕ubvert systems worldwide. The characters engage in conversations with historical revolution through the use of artifacts and archives, such as documentary images and film, sound bites of speeches, and found photographs ranging from the Black Panthers, Sandinistas, Russian Revolution, and the 2019 protests in the Caribbean and Latin America. They also study smaller acts of revolution: meetings, gatherings, and protests, and negotiate their distinct positions by citing reality TV, revolutionary leaders, poets and theorists including Adrienne Rich and Frantz Fanon. As the dancers move from solo choreographies to an improvised ensemble dance, the work calls forward the urgency of collective action in the long arc of organizing revolutions big and small. As a group, the dancers explore dance music鈥檚 liberatory dimensions as 颁贸谤诲辞惫补鈥檚 score moves from abrasive walls of sound to dance-inspired rhythms to sampled cut-ups of political speeches. Alongside the video, 颁贸谤诲辞惫补 creates an immersive installation, which includes ceramic sculptures that mirror the dreamlike set inside Break Room, and further complicate the divisions between the digital space and its physical reproduction.
The second act after Yellow, Guillotinae WannaCry, Green: Savage Sauvage Salvaje (2022), tells histories of organizing by African fugitive slaves (cimarrones) and Indigenous people within the forest and jungle across the Caribbean and the Americas. The work presents resistance to colonialism and capitalist-patriarchy鈥檚 insistence on the intertwinement of the subaltern and natural resources in order to render them both exploitable. By confronting this position鈥檚 violent applications, GREEN: Savage Sauvage Salvaje argues that this conflation supports the extractive practices which have resulted in the climate crisis and long ago, the dual inventions of class and race. Threading throughout the video are fragments of texts drawn from historical accounts, poetry by Derek Walcott, Alice Walker, and William Carlos Williams, contemporary voices from the zeitgeist鈥攔eality TV, Internet, radio, and theory鈥攁nd original text. For this particular score, 颁贸谤诲辞惫补 (with collaborator Matthew Gonzalez Kirkland) makes reference to popular dance forms like reggaeton, bomba y plena, salsa, and free jazz to cement these forms of revolt as part of larger Black and Indigenous cultural processes. The video is presented within another color-coded setting with artifacts from filming locations, including leaves and lichens, 3D scans of seeds, and taxidermied birds. In its totality, the installation looks to multiple timelines, past and future, and approaches 鈥榳ilderness鈥� as a collaborator in revolt and rejoicing.
This project expands on the artist鈥檚 explorations into zoological and botanical resistance to the environmental destruction by the human hand. It imagines a future landscape where flora and fauna survive and even thrive off pollution and other ravages, evolving in spite of harsh conditions. At the same time, as 颁贸谤诲辞惫补 continually looks to Indigenous knowledge and proposes futures beyond colonial logics, she shows us the strength in collectivity and improvisation that comes in slow political movements. For the artist, the future is deemed as a site of possibility, as she asks us to witness, grieve, organize, and revolt together, and to keep asking: What forms of liberation lie in starting anew for those bodies whose lives have historically been predicated by the violence of disempowerment?
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JOAN presents The Wreck and not the Story of the Wreck, the first institutional solo exhibition in Los Angeles by Oakland- and Puerto Rico-based artist Sof铆a 颁贸谤诲辞惫补. The exhibition features two video installations from the artist鈥檚 Guillotinae WannaCry series, along with a newly commissioned installation with sculptural and text-based works. 颁贸谤诲辞惫补 makes work that looks to science fiction as alternative history and considers climate capitalism鈥檚 deep entanglement with colonial erasure. The presentation at JOAN centers on her recent work on revolution鈥攂oth historical and imagined鈥攁sking what are the gestational conditions necessary for collectively imagining and constructing a liberated future.
Guillotinae WannaCry is set in the near future and owes its title to the 2017 ransomware attack and its aptitude in naming a spirit of malaise. The series conceives of revolution as a speculative and indeterminate process. Through absurdity and nonlinearity, each act makes a different proposition for finding new ways to revolt by moving away from an authorial voice, and unsettling the notion of progressive time by creating synesthetic relationships through color.
The first act, Guillotinae WannaCry: Yellow: Break Room (2019-21), resists historical tellings of revolution as individual-led events and looks instead at the collective to better understand who and what constitute organizing. Through a multichannel video work and a color-coded environment of readymades and objects, the work calls forward a near future where various possible ruptures鈥攆rom global uprisings to the destabilization of governance and a series of climate-related events鈥攕ubvert systems worldwide. The characters engage in conversations with historical revolution through the use of artifacts and archives, such as documentary images and film, sound bites of speeches, and found photographs ranging from the Black Panthers, Sandinistas, Russian Revolution, and the 2019 protests in the Caribbean and Latin America. They also study smaller acts of revolution: meetings, gatherings, and protests, and negotiate their distinct positions by citing reality TV, revolutionary leaders, poets and theorists including Adrienne Rich and Frantz Fanon. As the dancers move from solo choreographies to an improvised ensemble dance, the work calls forward the urgency of collective action in the long arc of organizing revolutions big and small. As a group, the dancers explore dance music鈥檚 liberatory dimensions as 颁贸谤诲辞惫补鈥檚 score moves from abrasive walls of sound to dance-inspired rhythms to sampled cut-ups of political speeches. Alongside the video, 颁贸谤诲辞惫补 creates an immersive installation, which includes ceramic sculptures that mirror the dreamlike set inside Break Room, and further complicate the divisions between the digital space and its physical reproduction.
The second act after Yellow, Guillotinae WannaCry, Green: Savage Sauvage Salvaje (2022), tells histories of organizing by African fugitive slaves (cimarrones) and Indigenous people within the forest and jungle across the Caribbean and the Americas. The work presents resistance to colonialism and capitalist-patriarchy鈥檚 insistence on the intertwinement of the subaltern and natural resources in order to render them both exploitable. By confronting this position鈥檚 violent applications, GREEN: Savage Sauvage Salvaje argues that this conflation supports the extractive practices which have resulted in the climate crisis and long ago, the dual inventions of class and race. Threading throughout the video are fragments of texts drawn from historical accounts, poetry by Derek Walcott, Alice Walker, and William Carlos Williams, contemporary voices from the zeitgeist鈥攔eality TV, Internet, radio, and theory鈥攁nd original text. For this particular score, 颁贸谤诲辞惫补 (with collaborator Matthew Gonzalez Kirkland) makes reference to popular dance forms like reggaeton, bomba y plena, salsa, and free jazz to cement these forms of revolt as part of larger Black and Indigenous cultural processes. The video is presented within another color-coded setting with artifacts from filming locations, including leaves and lichens, 3D scans of seeds, and taxidermied birds. In its totality, the installation looks to multiple timelines, past and future, and approaches 鈥榳ilderness鈥� as a collaborator in revolt and rejoicing.
This project expands on the artist鈥檚 explorations into zoological and botanical resistance to the environmental destruction by the human hand. It imagines a future landscape where flora and fauna survive and even thrive off pollution and other ravages, evolving in spite of harsh conditions. At the same time, as 颁贸谤诲辞惫补 continually looks to Indigenous knowledge and proposes futures beyond colonial logics, she shows us the strength in collectivity and improvisation that comes in slow political movements. For the artist, the future is deemed as a site of possibility, as she asks us to witness, grieve, organize, and revolt together, and to keep asking: What forms of liberation lie in starting anew for those bodies whose lives have historically been predicated by the violence of disempowerment?
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