Florencia Sosa Rey ×
Julia Eilers Smith

Photo of Florencia Sosa Rey with her father, Hector Sosa. With the permission of the artist. Photo: Olga Rey.

FatherDaughter is a collaborative performance conceptualized by Florencia Sosa Rey with the participation of her father, Hector Sosa. It was presented in a vacant lot on the new MIL Campus of the Université de Montréal in August 2022. The chosen location, a square of lawn near the Marcelle-et-Jean-Coutu walkway, connects the university complex to Acadie metro station. This pedestrian footbridge also links the neighbourhoods of Outremont and Parc-Extension, which are separated by the Canadian Pacific rail lines. The grassy lot where the performance was held forms a sort of mini-enclave in the urban landscape, an anonymous rest stop in the heart of a zone of transit and revitalization.

bodies traversed
from one end
to
another

The instructions for the performance are simple. The two performers move along a circular trajectory, but in opposite directions, one clockwise and the other counterclockwise. Changes in direction and variations in the size of the travelled circle are determined by the father—a trained athlete and professor of physical education—with the goal of avoiding any injuries and of introducing a variety of rhythms and shapes into the core of the action’s repetition. Every time they overlap, the performers alternate between the interior and exterior paths of the circle, making eye contact when possible during these moments of crossover. At the sound of a light whistle, the performance slowly concludes, the participants catch their breath before exiting the action. 

street sports
athletic
the work of the body
projected

Positioned side-by-side at first, then back-to-back, Sosa father and Sosa Rey rotate separately before embarking on their respective oppositional courses: one walking and the other running, for a period of 40 minutes. Dressed almost identically, in athletic wear composed of black tops and small blue shorts, their silhouettes echo one another, in an ongoing act of duplication. The doubling effect highlights the game of representation and reciprocity that the performers are engaged in.

game of attraction
of repulsion
of staggered
encounters

With this performance, father and daughter commemorate their 30-plus years of life together. For the occasion, they chose physical activity as a meeting point; it’s a symbolic intergenerational junction, sport being one of their preferred sites of sharing and exchange. A photograph from the family archives taken by the artist’s mother Olga Rey is a witness from the past: Sosa Rey is pictured at age 5 or 6, kicking an adult-size soccer ball on a playing field, accompanied by her father.

barrio Ciancio
parc Lucie-Bruneau
Campus MIL

Maipú
Montréal

Florencia Sosa Rey, FatherDaughter, 2023. With the permission of the artist.

Through their performance, this site, which doesn’t have an assigned use and borders a network of intersections and bustling overpasses, is momentarily converted into a space that commemorates their relationship. The circular lines drawn by their bodies recall the curves and sinuous routes of traffic. The loops they sketch out recall those of highway interchanges: on- and off-ramps that facilitate the flow of vehicles, connect roads that are otherwise separated, and allow drivers to avoid gridlock, change direction, and turn around. 

contractiontension
decontractiondispersion

But even as the performers’ movements merge with the surrounding circuits, they are also radically distinct, due to their unproductive logic, which is marked by the absence of a destination or a precise goal. The routes they trace don’t lead anywhere, except towards mutual learning through the interaction of their bodies in motion, as they activate and explore an intimacy that is theirs alone. Each loop traced by the steps of Sosa father and Sosa Rey is a circuit of exchange. Each revolution that they complete is punctuated by a point of contact, a familiar connection, that we can simultaneously read as a relay hand-off. 

teaching each other
to lead each other
through movement

In FatherDaughter, Sosa Rey also reveals a desire to reverse the roles at the heart of her paternal relationship, to take on the pedagogical or educational role normally assigned to the parent. Using the context of physical activity, the performance aims to communicate and transmit a non-traditional type of knowledge—a different kind of sensibility and experience elicited by the somatic, conceptual, and performance-based approach that grounds Sosa Rey’s practice. The choice of matching sports outfits could therefore be read as a symbol of unity or equity between father and daughter, or at least as an absence of adversity.

uprooted bodies
rooted in

If we were to use a pencil to trace the trajectories of the artist and her father, a concentric motif would emerge, its contour slowly thickening. As their feet graze or flatten the lawn in the same spots, the lines would become superimposed, intensifying the density of the outline. Sosa Rey’s artistic practice involves the mutual influence of performance and drawing; each method emanates from the physical gesture, and inscribes the gesture onto a given space. Her drawings, characterized by biomorphic shapes, evoke interacting or interlaced bodies, but also the invisible processes of feeling and of affective memory. On the flipside, her performances are drawings in motion, corporeal sketches. In FatherDaughter, the performers accompany each other in a shared action, even if they are going in different directions. By remaining alert to each other as they repeat the circular trajectory, they alter the contours of their relationship and redraw its borders.  

the real space
of the figurative

Translator: H Felix Chau Bradley

Florencia Sosa Rey is a visual artist based in Tiohtiá:ke/Mooniyand/Montréal. Through a physical and somatic approach expressed primarily through abstract drawing and performance, she explores themes of residual memory and affect left by people and experiences. She holds a BFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University and continue to develop a physical practice through various professional workshops. Her solo and collaborative work has been presented in Montreal, Quebec City, Toronto, Sudbury, the United Sates, Iceland, and Argentina.

Julia Eilers Smith is a curator and writer based in Tio'tia:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal.  She holds a master’s degree from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College and a bachelor’s degree in art history from UQAM. Since 2019, she serves as the Max Stern Curator of Research at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University. Prior to her current position, she worked at the ICA London, the Hessel Museum of Art, and SBC Gallery in Montreal. Her writings have been published on platforms such as e-flux and the art magazine Espace, art actuel.