Cíclos is an immersive action (an experiment), by Sofía Fernández Díaz and Sofía Gabriel that plays with the idea of performance as a ritual to honor the innate female connection with nature. This ritual invites the audience to sit around the performers, listen, observe, and experience the flow of improvisation.

Cíclos is an ode to the moon that celebrates life, changes, and process. A dialogue with intuition and symbolism that leaves traces on a canvas. A painting in motion. A live performance of gestures, ancestral traditions, natural materials, and tools.

Sofía Gabriel del Callejo believes in the force of collectivity for change. Formally trained in dance, during advance studies in Management, Policy and Culture she began to deconstruct her practice by using the liminality and freedom of performance to explore the relationships between movement, language and politics. Her current practice uses facilitation, performance, organizing, curation and administration as tools for feminist resistance against exclusion and violence. Examples include orchestrating simple performative actions for individuals to emerge as accomplices for change. Sofía is originally from Mexico City.

Sofía Fernández Díaz (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist from Mexico City searching for the hidden relationships between everything around us. Her process is fueled by an intimate knowledge of both ancient and modern processes, combining experimentation, intuition, and play to discover unexpected commonalities between unrelated materials. Her familiarity with naturally occurring patterns and formations allows her to recreate these systems in her work using beeswax, fibers, natural dyes and many other materials to form immediate, visceral connections with her viewers.

Sofía arrived in Chicago after receiving the Joan Livingston scholarship to earn her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies at SAIC. After graduating, she was selected to receive a Spark grant by Chicago Artist Coalition and invited to hold a 2023 Radicle Studio Residency at Hyde Park Art Center. She previously earned a BFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco and a degree in Art Anthropology from CIESAS in Mexico City.

In addition to being exhibited, published, and collected both nationally and internationally, Sofía has spent more than a decade exchanging ideas with artisans across Mexico, sharing her documentation and intimate knowledge of their processes and daily rituals through workshops on natural pigments and dyeing.

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Tags: Chicago, Cíclos, High Concept Labs, Lower West Side, Mana Contemporary, Monira Foundation, Open Lab, Open Lab: Sofía Gabriel "Cíclos", Sofía Gabriel