Opening Reception: Sofía Córdova: SIN AGUA

SIN AGUA
opening reception: Friday, February 2, 7-9 pm
on view: February 2–June 23, 2024

SIN AGUA is a video and sound installation at MOCA Tucson by artist Sofía Córdova that layers research and personal narrative catalyzed by the artist’s inquiry into water—its presence, absence, and significance—in Arizona’s arid landscape and in Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria.

Described by the artist as an “anti-documentary trilogy,” the three films merge Córdova’s research into the colonial erasure of Indigenous water systems in Arizona and it’s reverberations into present-day water access, while she contends with the arrival of Hurricane Maria and it’s ruinous impacts on her native Puerto Rico. The films layer footage culled from a vast range of sources including Hollywood films and Zoom interviews, views from car windows and vacant streets, communication with family on the island, mirage-like desert dances, and trips to tourist sites, archives, ruins, and strange infrastructures. Merged together, these scenes register how time collapsed in the process of making SIN AGUA. For the artist, “all time became one”—present-day Phoenix and built community experiments like the Biosphere 2 and Arcosanti began to resemble ruins. Córdova narrates the films, slipping between English and Spanish, and flitting from research observations to memoiristic digressions—all against an ominous soundtrack that hums with field recordings, as abrasive as the dry desert air.

These far-reaching elements are metabolized into a scintillating installation environment where past, present, and future collide signaling, in Córdova’s words, “history forever looping onto itself.”

SIN AGUA is organized by Julio César Morales, Executive Director & Co-Chief Curator, and Alexis Wilkinson, Curator.