RTS would like to welcome our April resident, Sofía Córdova, an artist based in Emeryville. As part of her RTS Residency, Córdova is working on an ongoing installation project, ¡Auxilio! ¡Socorro! (working title), that combines video, performance and two-dimensional work exploring science fiction, pop music, map making, and obsessive collecting to describe an imagined future.
The narrative of ¡Auxilio! ¡Socorro! revolves around a suite of original songs that refer to life in the future where the conditions of our planet, as we know them today, have deteriorated and become significantly altered by unnamed events. These songs are reworked into experimental compositions to form a soundtrack to a group of videos titled They Held Dances On The Graves Of Those Who Died In The Terror that document our lost “past”. Accompanying the videos is a series of redacted images titled The Kingdom is Me, created from magazine and newspapers clippings whose content has been edited out with black paint.
During her residency at RTS, Córdova plans to expand on this installation through a new video/performance work produced in two acts. Act 1 of the performance reinterprets popular songs from our “past” (based on our cultural present) in the tradition of the troubadour or griot, using known melodies to relay the news of the day. Act 2 employs amateur divination to write lyrics for the performance – a nod to Philip K Dick’s strategy for writing The Man in the High Castle.