Paraspace Books Film Screening #2: Sofía Córdova
In conjunction with the curatorial project Collective Presence, at DW through April 14, Paraspace Books will host a screening and discussion of the film, dawn chorus ii: el niagara en bicicleta, by Sofía Córdova.
Sofía Córdova will join the discussion via Skype, facilitated by S Rodriguez and Sara Balabanlilar, founders of Paraspace Books.
dawn chorus ii: el niagara en bicicleta was filmed in Puerto Rico over the last 2 years, shaped largely by the financial crisis and the island’s colonial history and more recently, the climate change-related natural disasters which have affected the island — the latest of which, Hurricane Maria, and the subsequent, grave political mishandling of the situation, gave the project its ending and the urgency. Prior to the hurricane, this work was already engaged in conversation with blackness and anti-blackness in the Caribbean, syncretic religion and dance music as modes of survival and liberation, and fantasy and science-fictional strategies as means to break out of our current arc of history. The film includes documentary tactics and fantastical elements, choreographed dance, and costuming.
More info: https://sofiacordova.com/dawn-chorusii-el-niagara-en-bicicleta
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Sofía Córdova was born in 1985 in Carolina, Puerto Rico and is currently based in Oakland, California. Córdova’s work considers sci-fi and futurity, dance and music culture(s), the internet, mystical things, extinction and mutation, migration, and climate change under the conditions of late capitalism and its technologies.
She completed her BFA at St. John’s University in conjunction with the International Center for Photography in New York City in 2006 and in 2010 She received her MFA from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Cordova has exhibited and performed at SFMOMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Arizona State University Museum, the Vincent Price Museum, and other venues internationally. Most recently she was an artist in residence at The Headlands Center for the Arts.
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Sara Balabanlilar and S Rodriguez co-run Paraspace Books, a bookstore and workshop project devoted to queer speculative and science fiction and a 2017 Idea Fund grant recipient.
Balabanlilar is an arts organizer and administrator in Houston; she currently serves as the Marketing and Events Director at Brazos Bookstore and is a member of the DiverseWorks Artist Advisory Board. Her interests include creative programming in the arts and the intersection of technology, identity, and literature.
Rodriguez is a Houston-based interdisciplinary artist and organizer, the former Exhibitions Coordinator of Art League Houston, and a current member of the DiverseWorks Artist Advisory Board. Their work most often explores the intersections of technology, the internet, and the nature of bodies – physical, digital, and linguistic. As an artist, they have been exhibited in various galleries around Houston and will be exhibited this year at Box13 and Alabama Song.
The Paraspace Books Film Screening Series will draw upon issues of the Gulf and Caribbean, speaking to themes of Collective Presence such as the environment, ethnicity (and environmental racism), and futurity.