dawn_chorusiii: the fruit they don’t have here / coro_del_albaiii: la fruta que no tienen aquí

2021 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

1:14:00 minutes

Sofía Córdova

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Sofía Córdova’s film dawn_chorusiii: the fruit they don’t have here / coro_del_albaiii: la fruta que no tienen aquí weaves together six California migration stories that resist dominant social narratives that flatten the experience of migrants. Though each woman’s story is based on interviews conducted by Córdova through voice memos or phone calls, the women’s lines in the film are reinterpreted and altered by the artist as a gesture that affords them opacity and relative anonymity. The opening sequence begins with four of the women looking into the camera, reciting a poem about the transition from winter to spring in Spanish and Mandarin: the birds dropping seeds they brought from afar, planting saplings that grow into trees bearing the fruit they don’t have in their new homes. By overlapping or disguising the women’s voices, Córdova purposefully seeds doubt about who is telling which story.

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Sofía Córdova’s films make many noises. Whether subtle, soothing, or disturbing, her practice contains questions about feminism, the Earth, power, liberation, migration, extinction, and extractive capitalism. Through time-warped fabulations, the artist speeds time up or slows it down, transmitting visions from the future to make sense of how power operates in the present. In other words, she explores the possibility of many futures through a plurality of audio-visual experiences condensed into a single digital experience. Córdova’s speculations combine crunchy electronic soundtracks with images of green forest beings or an ethereal, organic score that contextualises horrific personal narratives. This aesthetic experience troubles the notion that normalcy is guaranteed in the future—or at least what we humans on Earth know as normalcy—asserting that comfort on our planet is not guaranteed despite our best (and worst) efforts to alter our surroundings.

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Colors:

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• migration.n.01
• narrative.s.01
• woman.n.01
• poetry.n.01
• anonymity.n.01