Sofie Ramos: Space to Breathe — Deeper

THESE PERFORMANCES HAPPENED ON OCTOBER 26, 2018.

Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture (FMCAC) was proud to present an evening of performances for Space To Breathe, an installation by local multimedia artist Sofie Ramos. In her new commission for FMCAC, Ramos inhabited three entry sites to campus: the 1926 Guardhouse, the power transformer, and the driveway separating the two.

At the mid-point of Sofie Ramos’ Space to Breathe commission, the artist’s collaborator Chris Wood curated an evening of three site specific performances:

• Laetitia Sonami bought her unique musical interface,  the Spring Spyre, to Sophie Ramos’s guard house. Mixing abstract electronic with worldly utterances, she brought Ramos’ dystopian domestic world to the sonic surface.
• What happens when we stare at the protagonist for too long — do they notice? Are they aware of what we as the audience project onto them? Based on Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, Kim Ip or “Krimm” investigated the psychological dreamscape of Elizabet Vogler’s silence throughout the film. She investigates the power that chosen silence brings to a womxn protagonist.
• In an installation that invited viewers to speculate about absent inhabitants, Anthony A. Russell‘s performance warned, “they are among us now.” His intervention sought to subvert the exuberance of Ramos’s installation by imagining a time in the future of the space when the dwelling has been abandoned by its intended inhabitants, and then occupied by more nefarious characters.

All performances used the Guardhouse as a focal point. Many attendees enjoyed the offerings of Radhaus, the Interval, and the final Friday of the 2018 season for Off the Grid!

Free Admission

About the artists:

Sofie Ramos creates installations that are inspired by everyday material culture, curating found objects and patterns to make the mundane strange through form, color, and whimsy. Her site-specific work is known for its colorful chaos and continuous evolution. Ramos has shown at Mixed Greens gallery in New York, Swim Gallery in San Francisco, and Johansson Projects in Oakland, and she is an alum of the Artist in Residence program at Facebook HQ, where she is the only artist with three permanent installations.

Chris Wood is a Chicago-based artist who works across music, theater, dance, and projection.  He co-founded Mocrep, a performance collective dedicated to the collaborative creation, curation, and performance of radical art that engages with contemporary culture.  He contributed the audio environment for and has curated the performances within Ramos’ Space to Breathe.

Laetitia Sonami has been performing with her Personal Electronic Music Systems for the past forty years throughout the world, most notably with her lady’s glove. She now has invented a new instrument applying machine learning software to the control of audio synthesis in real time.

Kim Ip has been dancing fresh out of her vintage 2014 Mills College swimming pool. She is pleased to be creating something special in collaboration with Sofie Ramos and the spirits of Fort Mason.

Anthony A. Russell is an interdisciplinary artist based in San Francisco. He is an alumnus of the San Francisco Art Institute and a creative contributor to underground film and stage projects by the Brothers Kuchar, Dreams for Dead Cats Productions, and Peaches Christ Productions. His installations employ strategies from different mediums to produce abstract, site-specific extensions of his more intimate, and at times severe, performances. He has performed and screened work in the U.S. and Europe.