• writing
  • curating
    • ongoing collectives
    • independent curating
    • Platforms I direct
  • paper. wall. canvas.
    • drawing
    • Painting
  • Press
  • BIO / Contact
  • writing
  • curating
    • ongoing collectives
    • independent curating
    • Platforms I direct
  • paper. wall. canvas.
    • drawing
    • Painting
  • Press
  • BIO / Contact
Sofia V.A.

ongoing collectives

Picture
topsoil
Picture
a place that fosters us.

Picture
topsoil
with Amelie Wedel and Deniz Kirkali 

@topsoil_istaken is a transnational curatorial and research collective formed by Sofia Villena Araya, Deniz Kirkali and Amelie Wedel in 2017 in London. Individually engaged in research areas such as material feminism, critical ecologies, postcoloniality, and geopolitics and based in different geographical contexts - San Jose (Costa Rica), Istanbul (Turkey) and Berlin (Germany), together we seek to bring into conversation this multitude of contextual and disciplinary perspectives. Through creating a process of prolonged conversations, we ask how to work and think with each other through an approach that prioritises care and sensibility to what drives our research and practice. 

We therefore initiate long-term collaborative research projects with thinkers and practitioners from various places and disciplines to collect methods and tools that help us move towards a shared ground while being attentive to specificities. We develop experimental exhibition formats as collective efforts and rehearsal spaces. In addition, we invite the participants to continue thinking together across distance through our online archive. Here, we share the reflections that surface in the afterlife of an encounter, we re-think and re-work, we rehearse and fail, and become attentive to the ways in which ideas are moved, inflected and twisted differently over time and space. 



Picture
Read _ Experimental Pedagogies
Picture
First exhibition we curated together
Picture
Read _ Rising below the surface


a place that fosters us.
with Marta Melia  
​

​started in December of 2018 as a nomadic curatorial project that temporarily dwells in living spaces in the city of London. The first iteration comprised an exhibition and an events programme (two sound walks and a film screening). The second iteration comprised an evening of performances and the edition of a zine. And, the third iteration comprised two workshop - performances and a dinner. 
Picture
1st iteration
Picture
2nd iteration
Picture
3rd iteration
Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.