Southern Exposure: Love Letters to Aliens (closing reception)
5:00 PM – Doors Open
5:30 PM – Letter Writing Workshop with Flying Over Walls
6:30 PM – Standing On The Earth Beneath Our Feet Performance by Roco Córdova
As the exhibition Love Letters to Aliens comes to a close amidst national uprising and terrifying acts of state-enacted violence, we invite our community to come together again in honor of the many artists transgressing borders in their work, lives, and bodies. The evening will begin with a letter-writing workshop, reaching out to incarcerated queer and trans individuals, in collaboration with our event partners Flying Over Walls. After, join us for a performance by Roco Córdova of Standing On The Earth Beneath Our Feet. Finally, enjoy drinks, art, and community that fosters belonging for all of us aliens.
This closing performance functions as both ritual and process. Working with voice and electronics, Roco Córdova responds to the space, the body, and the tangible and intangible elements of the exhibition Love Letters to Aliens. As the show comes to a close, Córdova offers their practice and months-long engagement by consecrating the gallery as a gathering ground to experience and examine our collective sense of alterity. This piece contemplates the following questions: What are we transforming into as we experience unprecedented global change? Who are we becoming while the world is upended yet we continue standing on the earth beneath our feet?
ABOUT THE ARTIST
ROCO CÓRDOVA was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico and is a vocalist, composer, producer and improviser based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Córdova’s music fuses diverse influences with electronic media, chance operations, gradual processes, noise, improvisation, and timbral techniques of composition. Voice is at the core of their practice: they weave together extended techniques like throat singing, overtone singing, falsetto, and vocal percussion into live performances that edge between ritual and happening.
ABOUT THE EVENT PARTNER
FLYING OVER WALLS PRISONER SOLIDARITY PROJECT is a Queer/Trans Prisoner Solidarity Project in the SF Bay Area. They are outraged by the violence of the prison industrial complex against LGBTQ+ people and respond through advocacy, education, direct action, and community building. Their letterwriting & penpal program resists the violent isolation of the prison system by connecting our queer and trans community across prison walls. They work towards the abolition of the prison industrial complex, staying rooted in the experiences and wisdom of the currently and formerly incarcerated.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
SHOLEH ASGARY (b. Tehran, Iran) is an artist whose practice engages sound, hybrid art forms, and performance to investigate, memorialize, and express the complexities of joy and survival inherent in diasporic and refugee experiences. Asgary’s primary material and deepest conceptual concern is sound. Through site-specific installations, sound sculptures, performances, archival projects, and collective collaborations, her work challenges colonial assumptions about what is heard, proposing new futures.