Sofía Tormenta | UMBRA|ES
AUDIOVISUAL ARTIST & PERFORMER

SOFIA
STORM

Zen Futurism

Sofía Tormenta

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, performances, and audiovisual pieces, she develops a language that combines the physical recording of gesture with the exploration of acoustic textures. She works with industrial and natural materials such as metal, concrete, volcanic rock, sandpaper, hammers, and glass, using them to generate friction, resonance, and rhythmic structures.

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

social interstice

An experiential space that escapes the logic of the market and utility.

Work-state

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

Conflictive relationship

A bond based on friction and tension instead of harmony.

Body-interface

An operational device that mediates between matter, machine, and environment.

Mistake

Productive deviation that acts as a generative condition of structure.

Repetition

Constructive mechanism that produces rhythm, wear and transformation.

Feedback

Live circuit where action modifies the system and vice versa.

Body awareness

A form of perception where sound is experienced physically.

Liminal structure

Unstable configuration between opposite poles that never settles.

Chaos-outside

External force field in constant exchange with the work.

Silence and noise

Fundamental tension that structures the sound experience.

Becoming

Continuous process of transformation without a definitive form.

AVAILABLE WORKS

WORK RECORD

Registro 1

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.