Bio
Sofia Valiente is an award-winning photographer and interdisciplinary artist with two published books, Miracle Village (2014) and Foreverglades (2019). In 2015, she received the World Press Photo award for Miracle Village (1st prize, portraits, stories) and she is also a two-time recipient of the South Florida Cultural Consortium Artist
Fellowship. In 2017, Sofia won the Knight Arts Challenge Grant for Foreverglades and in 2018 she received a State of Florida Individual Artist grant.
Sofia’s work has been published in Time, the Guardian, Smithsonian, Vice, American Photo Magazine, and many other media outlets. She is represented by Daniel Blau Gallery in Munich, Germany, and her projects have been exhibited internationally with solo shows in London, Paris, Munich, NYC, and in numerous other group shows in museums and photography festivals around the world. This year, Sofia made her directorial debut with “Ivy Ridge.” She holds a BFA in Art from Florida International University in Miami, and an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California, Riverside.
Listen to Sofia Valiente’s Interview
Artist Statement – Foreverglades
For decades after Western Expansion, South Florida was still a wilderness. Only once pioneers dredged canals and redirected the flow of Lake Okeechobee did this area become habitable. These once considered “useless” territories of marshes and swamps ultimately gave way to development and industry. On the southern tip of the lake lies Belle Glade, a small agricultural town that one might pass on a road trip today, just a couple of stoplights and it’s gone. It hides a rich history that leads to how we arrived here to Florida.
In 2015, I moved to Belle Glade into a former rooming house apartment and soon after came across books by Lawrence E. Will and Zora Neale Hurston. Will painted a picture of the pioneers who developed the area through persistence and foresight, and for me, Hurston gave a voice to the workers who built the Glades with their bare hands. Their writing became my framework for exploring the past and looking at its contemporary parallels. In this time capsule, history is present. Roots run deep and the pioneer spirit can still be felt.
My practice stems from the documentary tradition— I employ an anthropological approach to fieldwork and produce photographic and lens based media projects while embedded within communities. Relationships and involvement with communities beyond photographs is central to my practice.
The dissemination of my work has always been integral to my practice. I produce photo books and work with archival materials, textual assemblage, found objects, and produce large public art installations. My work is narrative at its core, I am interested in subjects that are counter histories— I address stereotypes, societal norms, traumas and subjugation. Recently, I’ve begun to work more experimentally— utilizing collaboration, performance and memory mining in film and my storytelling practice. My work challenges ideas of authorship and is rooted in an awareness of systems and tactics of power. I address the artifice and constructed language of documentary in my work.
I make work that is critical and representational— that insists on a direct relationship to material forms in the real world. Surpassing the dominant form of informing that is central to documentary practices, I provide an ambiguous framework for the spectator to give them the freedom of interpretation so that they can participate in the construction of meaning. I don’t impose overall attitudes or beliefs or make assertions on a subject, on the contrary, I’m interested in fuzzing the boundaries of perspective and truth, and of subject, maker and viewer. I seek to remove the “distant safety/protective barrier of the viewer from the subject” that is common in the conventional documentary form, to allow the viewer to become enveloped in and immersed in a story that is about someone and someplace else. I am both documentarian and anti-documentarian at the same time.