Sofia Huarte Aguilar Q&A
By Ado Nkemka
Photo courtesy Sofia. A portrait headshot of a non-binary, Hispanic human. They look into the camera in a mischevious way, as though they are holding on to a funny secret. Theirs short hair is dyed pink, and growing out at the roots.
New Works Marketing Coordinator Ado Nkemka spoke with poet, playwright, and academic Sofia Huarte Aguilar about their upcoming soundwalk on October 20th. This is the first of three walks Sofia will lead this season (up next: December 15th and February 16th) for their “Sound Poetry and Change” series. Register here and read this Q&A to learn more about Sofia and the inspiration behind this upcoming soundwalk. This interview was lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Ado: Can you tell me a little bit about yourself?
Sofia: My name is Sofia. I’m 23. I’m in my last year of a combined degree in drama and philosophy. I feel like I'm very lucky that the two things I'm doing most are two things that I'm really passionate about. I love drama. I'm a multidisciplinary artist. I also have a little bit of a music background. I have a little bit of a dance background. But what I most predominantly do is drama. I'm an actor. I'm also a writer. I write poetry. I participated in a Playwrights Unit recently. That was my first time writing a play. So that was really interesting and really different for me, but it made me really excited, and made me want to go a little bit deeper into writing plays and just explore that a little bit more in my practice.
And then on my philosophy side, I really like academic research. I had the opportunity to do research on epistemic injustice, this past summer, at the University of Calgary, and that was something that I had the inkling that I was going to really enjoy, but it was my first time being a proper researcher and getting paid, and being a full time researcher for three months. So that was an incredible experience. And it made me really excited to see that there are opportunities to write about and theorize about injustice and utilize political philosophy as a strategic tool for liberation.
And I have a cat. Her name is Luna. She's awesome. I love her very much. Yeah, that's a little bit about me.
Photo by Tim Nguyen. Image of two people standing side by side in front of a clear majestic chair. Both people are wearing soft pink and white outfits. Sofia on the right of the image is wearing pink fairy wings. With their right hand, they're stretching chewed bubblegum out of their mouth.
Epistemology is the theory of knowledge right?
Yes. So a lot of what I'm writing about has to do with, mainly, social epistemology and political epistemology. So the ways that structures of knowledge and like social structures of meaning can be oppressive to people, and how the very idea of truth and legitimacy can be used as an oppressive tool for control. So that's kind of the sphere that I live in: philosophy.
Do you have an example of how that is relevant to maybe something that’s happening in Calgary – for someone who has absolutely no idea what this is?
I feel like in any place in the Western world that has a history of colonialism, a way to think about epistemic injustice and to think about the importance of it is how we have discounted Indigenous ways of knowing, for example, or how Western society and Western academic systems and systems of education have discarded and set aside and made, for one example, Indigenous ways of knowing less important, and also cultural practices that often get delegitimized and even just policing the way that people talk and policing the way that people express themselves, which I think is really prevalent in academia.
There is one very specific way that you're supposed to talk, and supposed to write, and supposed to think, and if you can't conform to that, the things that you have to say are pushed aside a little bit, which means that we end up losing a lot of very important knowledge, and we end up not listening to people who know a lot.
I read in your bio that you’re a student organizer as well. I was wondering how your research has tied into your work as a student organizer.
I feel like I've been, especially as of recently, stepping back from my role as a student organizer a little bit, just because life is super busy, and there's only so many hours in the day, and there's only one of me.
But I think the most important thing that I did as a student organizer was that I helped organize the first student strike in Alberta, in Alberta's history. So the drive behind the strike was trying to push back against budget cuts in post secondary institutions in Alberta.
It was really led by a group of students, but also international students, because since I'm an international student, and I feel that the way that post secondary institutions are structured in Canada is often very exploitative of international students, and will make us bear the burden of any of the budget cuts that happen at a provincial and at a federal level, and will use international tuition spikes, which are not regulated by the government, and there is no cap to how high they can go to make up for any budget cuts.
One of the primary ways that my research connects to my practice as an organizer is in trying to keep the barrier for entry, and trying to keep post secondary education in Alberta accessible, and trying to be very mindful of those class barriers. If we start losing the voices of international students, and the voices of working class students, then the pool of knowledge that we have in academic spaces is significantly reduced, and it starts lacking some very important perspectives.
How did you get into poetry?
I started writing poetry because I took a workshop with a performance art company that is super, super interesting, and I am a big fan of theirs. Their name is La Pocha Nostra, and they are a group of Mexican immigrants who immigrated everywhere in the world and do research on pedagogy, using performance art and theatre as pedagogical tools to teach people about oppression and liberation and using them (performance art and theatre) as tools for consciousness raising.
So I attended an intensive with them in 2022, in Oaxaca, Mexico, and one of the primary ways that they generate content is through collective poetry. One of the activities we did, while we were there, was a manifesto of disruptive poetry. We did a lot of exercises of poetry writing and collective poetry, like call and response circles. That was the first time that I was more formally introduced to poetry. I had written poetry here and there, throughout my life, just as a creative person who is always trying to do a little bit of everything, but that was the first time that I was introduced to it in a more formal way.
After that, I had some really difficult times in my life, like immediately after this intensive. And I found myself writing poetry, trying to write one poem a day. I did this for a period of three or four months, because I was just not doing great. And it was a way to regulate myself emotionally – using it as a very therapeutic tool.
That was where it started. That was where I first found my poetic voice. And then I really fell in love with the medium, so I started exploring it more. And then when I started writing my solo show, which I later took to this Playwrights Unit, I wanted to incorporate poetry in it, and a big chunk of that script is poetry.
So that's been the journey that I have taken in poetry. I still write poetry very frequently, but not once a day anymore. That was a very intense experience. Awesome, but I think it's hard to keep to that for longer than three or four months.
Photo by Tim Nguyen. Image of 5 people surrounding Sofia, who is seated on a bed, during the performance of a play.
I read that you do free verse poetry, why free verse?
So this intensive that I took in performance art was all about making disruptive political art, and I think it was an important part, in this context, to have a lot of freedom in the way that you write and that you express yourself. So I think something that is really interesting about La Pocha, to me, specifically, as both an artist and an academic, is that a lot of the members that make up the company are also academics. There were a lot of PhD students and professors not only in the members that run the company, but also the people who were at the intensive, because a lot of their practice is very tightly related to research.
One of the things that they do is non-traditional research and non-traditional academic writing. And I think that they carried that over to poetry as well, in that idea of free verse and being like, “Okay, there are no specific particular rules. We can break the format. We can disrupt the format.” I found that moving on from that and taking that into, like, my day to day practice it also allows for a level of honesty and and a very clear translation of feelings, because poems can be whatever they need to be, and they don't have to have a rhyming pattern, or be however many syllables, or so on and so forth, and so it's been really helpful in just being, like free expression.
Where did your idea for the sound poetry and change sound walk series come from?
When Rebecca (Bruton) first approached me with this project, I knew that I wanted to bring poetry into it somehow, just because it has been so central to my practice, as of recently. And the more that I thought about it, and the more that I tried to find a spot where I wanted to lead this walk, I kept coming back to something that's close to where I live. I live really close to the Elbow river.
And I'm always very conscious of the contrast between – when I go into the park or down to the river and the contrast of that, and the downtown background that is so so close, because I still live very downtown. So that tension, that contrast, has always been interesting to me. Fall is my favorite season, so watching the leaves turn always brings up a lot of emotions for me and I'm starting to realize that the year is ending; starting to realize that winter is coming; and winter makes me very moody. And all of those feelings are all happening and being brought up.
So I think that’s what started shaping the idea of transitions in my head. And then also the fact that it's so close to my apartment, a place that I now call home, and that now feels like home, but also, as an immigrant who has not been in Calgary for very long, altogether. It's like that transition of “This is my home, but it's also not my home.” And it's also nature, but it's also downtown, and it's also winter, but it's also summer. I started seeing the patterns and all of those things, And I wanted to talk like speak to those.
How long have you been in Calgary? I'm almost assuming that you immigrated to Canada via Calgary, so I don't know if that's the case.
I moved to Calgary September of 2019, so it's been five years now. It was a little unexpected for me to end up in Calgary, but I love it here now. And I'm hoping to go into my Masters next year, and I don't know if I'm going to stay in Calgary for that. But the thought of leaving Calgary now makes me feel like, “Oh my god, no. This is my home and I have my friends, and I have my apartment, and I have my places.” So yeah, it's been, it's been an interesting process, for sure.
What do you think is something that you hope that participants get out of your walk?
The main takeaway that I want people to have, is just that poetry can be a lot of fun and that it can be a great way to – because we are thinking about sound, and because we are thinking about the sounds of the city specifically, I think my wish is that people see how malleable poetry is as a medium, and how freeing it can be to invite these strong emotions that often arise with poetry and just like, sit with them and let them chill and hang out.
And what are you most looking forward to on this walk?
The little trail that I have planned is a place that I go on walks very often because it is close to where I live. So I have found a lot of comfort and a lot of, in a sense, wisdom in this little trail. So I'm excited to share that with people, and to be like, “Hey, look, this is a cool part of a city that is very comforting and great for walks!”
Register for “Sound Poetry and Change” on Showpass.
