Crossing to the Dreams

A Home in Transit and a Ritual of Nomadic Identities

by Sofia Saavedra

EXHIBITION :: AUGUST 1-17, 2025

Opening Reception :: Friday, Aug 1, 7–10 pm
Closing Reception :: Sunday, Aug 17, 7–10 pm

Curated by Alonso Galue, Agitator member

• Sofia Saavedra has been awarded a prestigious Artist Protection Fund Fellowship and placed in residence at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). During this residency she has been invited to exhibit with Agitator Gallery.

Sofía Saavedra is a Venezuelan artist who—in this solo exhibition—will be presenting paintings and other works that celebrate human diversity and approach identity(ies) in dynamism, transit, and transformation. The exhibit will feature her large, colorful canvases with humans & animals interwoven in allegorical and symbolic tableaus.

See below for the full catalogue essay on Sofia’s work
by Pedro Marrero Fuenmayor, artist/writer born in Caracas, Venezuela

SOFIA SAAVEDRA @ AGITATOR GALLERY, CHICAGO

by Pedro Marrero Fuenmayor 2/2025

Sofía Saavedra is a Venezuelan artist whose main means of expression is painting—an art form that dialogues and is complemented in her work with performance art, installation art, media, and writing. Sofía approaches painting from a socio-political and ethical perspective, defining herself as a “cultural activist.” She also considers painting a ritualistic act of healing. Because of her own life experiences and origins, Sofía’s attention and inspiration are focused on minorities and dissidence, a position she uses to resist cultural and racial homogenization. Close to identity politics and the concept of intersectionality, the artist conceives identity as a hybrid construction “between the individual and the collective.” Sofía’s work aims to celebrate human diversity, prompted by a will to undermine the basis of the established binary conception of the world, and with the writings of philosophers and social critics like Paul B. Preciado and Gloria Anzaldúa as references. In opposition to a static and preestablished understanding of identity, Sofía prefers to approach identities in their dynamism, transit, and transformation, and has since the beginning of her career, tried to read identity considering its “nomadic” and mutant qualities. Nomadism and mutation are liminal states—moments of generative ambiguity that bring crisis and change. Embodying the potentially infinite possibilities of intermediate states, giving them color, body, and matter, appears as a fundamental goal in Saavedra’s art.

In November 2024 Sofía began her Artist Protection Fund (APF) Fellowship in-residence at UIUC. As the APF artist-in-residence, she is fulfilling the role of cultural consultant at The Krannert Center for the Performing Arts for the theatrical production “Plumas Negras,” scheduled for the spring of 2025. She is also contributing as an artist to the set design of the play, in parallel to working on the exhibition project “Crossing to Dreams” (“El cruce hacia los sueños”), an ongoing series of paintings accompanied by video and sound poetry to be shown at Agitator Gallery, in Chicago, in August 2025. The “crossing” referenced in the show’s title comes from a spatial and temporal allegory used by Preciado in An Apartment on Uranus - Chronicles of the Crossing (2019). Sofía has been working on the poetic linkage between this space-moment of trance, transit, and possibilities to dreams, and she invites us to re-imagine the world collectively from there.

Migration and diaspora are daily concerns to every Venezuelan, inside or outside Venezuela. These subjects are not absent from Sofía’s body of work. However, her recent participation in the Tijuana Triennial: Pictoric International Art (2021, 2024) in Mexico, and her experience as an artist-in-residence in the United States, has projected her place of away from the specificity of the Venezuelan experience, and into the southern border of the United States of America, to speak of the frontier that separates the Global South from the Global North, from the theoretical and onto the very real. The book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) by Chicana scholar and poet Gloria Anzaldúa, centered on her intercultural reflections as a mestiza and queer woman who grew up at the Texas/México border, has been of special resonance for Sofía in her artistic research about migration and cultural hybridization.

Sofía’s pictorial practice is composed of figurative works on canvas of large format on which the human figure appears insistently, with a multiplicity of bodies interacting with and dissolving into each other, with the recurrent appearance of animals, which remind us of our indomitable nature, and written words, adding rationality and poetry to the mix. Her use of color is free of any naturalistic convention, and it responds to intuitive processes; she indiscriminately applies pigments of different types to the same painting. As Sofía operates energetically on the canvases, she leaves an evident imprint of her entire body in her works.

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Author: Pedro Marrero Fuenmayor, born in Caracas, Venezuela, where he lives and works, is a multidisciplinary artist, researcher, writer, disseminator and disability activist interested in issues of body and identity politics from the perspective of physical dissidence. He focuses creatively and in an investigative manner on the body and its cultural and contestatory implications, as manifested in the visual arts, literature, dance, performance and the intimate and political activism of people with disabilities. Among his references, Crip Theory plays an important role, with its invitation to bodily subversion from a political interrogation of normality.
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Crossing to the Dreams Exhibit