Sofia Valiente
b. 1990, Portland, Oregon. Lives in Miami, FL.
My practice stems from the documentary tradition— I employ an anthropological approach to fieldwork and produce photographic and lens based media projects while embedded within communities. Relationships and involvement with communities beyond photographs is central to my practice.
The dissemination of my work has always been integral to my practice. I produce photobooks and work with archival materials, textual assemblage, found objects, and produce large public art installations. My work is narrative at its core, I am interested in subjects that are counter histories— I address stereotypes, societal norms, traumas and subjugation. Recently, I’ve begun to work more experimentally— utilizing collaboration, performance and memory mining in film and my storytelling practice. My work challenges ideas of authorship and is rooted in an awareness of systems and tactics of power. I address the artifice and constructed language of documentary in my work.
I make work that is critical and representational — that insists on a direct relationship to material forms in the real world. Surpassing the dominant form of informing that is central to documentary practices, I provide an ambiguous framework for the spectator to give them the freedom of interpretation so that they can participate in the construction of meaning.
I don’t impose overall attitudes or beliefs or make assertions on a subject, on the contrary, I’m interested in fuzzing the boundaries of perspective and truth, and of subject, maker and viewer. I seek to remove the “distant safety/protective barrier of the viewer from the subject” that is common in the conventional documentary form, to allow the viewer to become enveloped in and immersed in a story that is about someone and someplace else. I am both documentarian and anti-documentarian at the same time.
Sofia Valiente
https://sofiavaliente.samexhibit.com/home
WOPHA Congress
from October 23 to 26, 2024
www.wophacongress.org
www.wopha.org
