Aguacero de Mayo: Sofía Acosta‑Varea (CDMX - Upstairs)

Her practice spans installation, image and archival intervention, cartography, and printmaking. Her work questions gendered narratives and engages with post-extractive perspectives on contemporary territory.

 

She has exhibited in Ecuador and abroad, with projects such as Deslumbrante Oscuridad (Galería N24, 2023), Overground Resistance (CAC Quito, 2022), and Paisaje/Territorio (MAAC, 2019). She curated Ordinaria (Arte Actual FLACSO, 2018) and has taught workshops at the Guadalajara International Book Fair (2015) and Harvard University (2018). She is an alumna of the SOMA Educational Program (2020–2022).

 

 

" What objects do we decide to keep when a house must be emptied, when a life is left behind?

 

Sofía Acosta-Varea packed a pair of glass jars in which she preserved rain and a breath of air from the second of May, 2013—the day her son was born. Tied together with a piece of cloth from her grandfather’s sailboat, these jars accompanied Sofía and Sol in their move from Ecuador to Mexico almost ten years later.

 

From this pair of containers emerges Aguacero de Mayo, a continuation and closure of the project Deslumbrante Oscuridad (2023), in which Sofía recorded the telepathic conversations she shared with her son during the years they lived apart. Here, the fictional elements are the captured water and wind which, after the move, come to life until they overflow. In the second part of Maldita tu obra—a piece filmed in 16 mm by Kiryl Synkou—Sofía and Sol decide to return the rain to the water and the air to the wind, in a ritual of forgetting but also of intimate liberation; in the end, memory weighs, occupies space, and is fallible. (...) "

 

Exhibtion text by Abril Castro Prieto