Sofía Tormenta | UMBRA|ES
AUDIOVISUAL ARTIST & PERFORMER

SOFIA
STORM

Zen Futurism

BIOGRAPHY

Sofía Tormenta (Argentina) is an audiovisual artist, director and performer, based in Mexico since 2020. Her practice focuses on sound experimentation and the investigation of the relationships between body, matter and sound.

Through installations, performance art, and audiovisual pieces, he develops a language that combines the physical recording of gestures with the exploration of acoustic textures.

He works with industrial and natural materials such as metal, concrete, volcanic stones, sandpaper, hammers and glass, used to generate frictions, resonances and rhythmic structures.

His work understands sound as matter and process rather than as a musical result, exploring the tension between silence and noise, and between the mechanical and the organic.

He has collaborated with artists such as Isaac Soto and Leslie Garcia.

In 2024, she participated in the 20th edition of MUTEK.MX, where she presented the piece alongside Isaac Soto. Frictic, focused on the sound investigation of friction as a material and energetic phenomenon.

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

Sofía Tormenta's practice is part of a central shift in contemporary art: the artwork is not conceived as a closed object, but as an active condition of experience. Her pieces do not represent, illustrate, or narrate. They operate. They are activated in real time through the body, matter, sound, error, and the presence of the other.

The theoretical framework that underlies their practice is the relational aesthetics by Nicolas Bourriaud. In this paradigm, art is no longer defined by the autonomy of the object, but by its capacity to produce social interstices and shared experiences. Tormenta adopts an aesthetic of friction and resistance, where the bond emerges from insistent repetition and the contained violence of the gesture.

WORK AS A CONDITION
The work is an open situation. It moves away from fixed form to prioritize the production of ephemeral relational states and constantly changing perceptual thresholds.
FRICTION AESTHETICS
Human connection is not found in consensus, but in tension. It arises from the resistance of matter and the energetic clash of bodies in space.
BODY-INTERFACE
The body is the technical device that mediates between the machine and the environment. It is a body that works, wears down, adjusts, and, vitally, fails.
SOUND MATTER
Sound is a physical phenomenon, not a musical one. Listening becomes bodily: the ear perceives intensities, rhythms, and vibrations before meanings.
ERROR AS A DRIVING FORCE
Deviation is generative. The human is defined by the capacity to inhabit the flaw, finding in error a power for aesthetic becoming.
LIMINAL STRUCTURES
Intermediate zones between order and chaos. The work is never closed, remaining in constant dialogue with a chaotic and ever-changing outside world.
Zen Futurism
A poetic synthesis between contemporary technological acceleration and perceptive stillness. The future doesn't burst forth with a roar, but breathes with sensory clarity.

CONCEPTUAL GLOSSARY

Relational aesthetics

A theoretical framework that conceives of art as the production of human relationships and shared situations rather than as autonomous objects.

social interstice

A temporary space of experience that momentarily escapes the dominant logics of the market and utility.

Work-state

Work understood as an active condition, ongoing process and open situation.

Conflictive relationship

An aesthetic bond based on friction, error, and tension, not on harmony or consensus.

Body-interface

Body understood as an operational device that mediates between matter, sound, machine and environment.

Mistake

Productive deviation that acts as a generative condition of perception, structure, and becoming.

Repetition

Constructive mechanism that produces rhythm, wear, adjustment and transformation.

Feedback

Live circuit where action modifies the system and the system responds to action.

Sound as matter

Conception of sound as a physical and procedural phenomenon, not as a musical result.

Body awareness

A form of perception where sound is experienced physically, rather than intellectually.

Liminal structure

Unstable configuration that emerges between opposite poles and never becomes definitively fixed.

Chaos-outside

External force field with which the work maintains a constant exchange.

Silence and noise

Fundamental tension that structures the sound and perceptual experience.

Mechanical and organic

Duality traversed by the body and matter in constant friction.

Zen Futurism

Conceptual synthesis between contemporary acceleration and conscious presence.

Becoming

Continuous process of transformation without purpose or definitive form.

AVAILABLE WORKS

WORK RECORD

Registro

FURTHER READING

RELATIONAL AESTHETICS AND CONTEMPORARY PRACTICES
  • Nicolas Bourriaud (1998). Relational aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses du Réel.
  • Nicolas Bourriaud (2002). Postproduction. New York: Lukas & Sternberg.
  • Claire Bishop (2012). Artificial Hells. London: Verso.
BODY, ACTION AND PERFORMATIVITY
  • Rose Lee Goldberg (2011). Performance Art. London: Thames & Hudson.
  • Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge.
  • Judith Butler (1993). Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge.
ERROR, REPETITION AND BECOMING
  • Gilles Deleuze (1968). Difference and repetition. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
  • Gilles Deleuze (1962). Nietzsche and philosophy. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
  • Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari (1980). A thousand plateaus. Paris: Editions de Minuit.
SOUND, LISTENING AND MATERIALITY
  • Jacques Attali (1977). Noise. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
  • Jonathan Sterne (ed.) (2012). The Sound Studies Reader. London: Routledge.
  • Roland Barthes (1982). The Obvious and the Obtuse. Barcelona: Paidós.
SHADOW, PERCEPTION AND EAST / WEST
  • Jun'ichirō Tanizaki (1933). In Praise of Shadows. Tokyo: Le Promeneur.
  • Robert M. Pirsig (1974). Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
SIXTH FLOOR — CONCEPTUAL AFFINITIES
  • Giorgio Agamben (1990). The Coming Community. Madrid: Sexto Piso.
  • Giorgio Agamben (1996). Means without end. Madrid: Sexto Piso.
  • Giorgio Agamben (2002). The Open. Madrid: Sexto Piso.
  • Giorgio Agamben (2006). What is a device? Madrid: Sexto Piso.
COMMUNITY, PRESENCE AND RELATIONSHIP
  • Maurice Blanchot (1983). The Unconfessed Community. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.
  • Jean-Luc Nancy (2000). Be singular plural. Paris: Galilée.