What is my “why?”
“There are fourteen stories told in endless variations”, says Italo Calvino. These same fourteen stories have erected some states and overthrown others, traced borders on white sand, and driven hammers into the concrete wall separating East from West Berlin.
I believe that cultural change begins with acknowledging the stories we choose to tell repeatedly and creating space for new ones to be told. I choose to create space for new stories by working with organizations and communities through participatory design, programming and digital-analog methodologies.
A Little About Me
I’m…
An ENFJ
A Third Culture Kid
A Dancer & Poet
My Values
Transparency
Experimentation
Reciprocity
Congruence
On My Bucket List
Speak about
Publish a book
Reciprocity
Congruence
Artist Statement
Culture is an agreement to see the world through the same lens. What we hear, see, taste, and feel is in dialogue with the maps we’ve been given to navigate the world around us—maps containing so many words and metaphors, dragging their preconceived meanings across the land like tails. One might wonder how our experience of ourselves and our surroundings might change if we could escape the confines of this cultural map. What lies just beyond the borders of language and design, in the terra incognita of our selves?
I consider myself an artrepreneur and creative storyteller.
I was raised in Bolivia and moved to New York for a Master's in Design and Urban Ecologies at Parsons in late August 2022. I was shocked by the subway. I looked at people looking down at their devices, rushing to work, scrolling, then rushing to get home. My cousin who lives in the city told me shortly after my arrival that his days consist of looking at his small screen in the morning, then his medium-sized screen throughout the day, then his large screen, and finally his small screen right before bed. I pledged to resist the device-heavy productivity ethos, yet a few months in, it became little more than a hum.
As a social anthropologist by formation, I understand that the central insight of this field is that the social world we exist in does not exist in an absolute sense. There is a choice to exist in the world differently, but the thing about culture is that when it’s there, we don’t know we’re in it. We lose the ability to listen. In the words of Cornell West, “We become too well adjusted to injustice.“
My work, intersecting poetry, somatic practice, and urban installation, creates liminal spaces where we deeply listen to culture and question its absoluteness. In listening with our whole selves, we create spaces of resistance where change might take root.
To me, experience design refers to creating temporary mental and physical structures, holding off a contemplative space against the pressures of habit. My projects consistently center on reclaiming the right to rest, privacy, and contemplation—to be “left but a little to ourselves” in a world where our every last minute is co-opted as a financial resource by the technologies we use daily.
Spectactors are invited to participate in this act of joyful deviance.
Sofia Kavlin is a conceptual artist based in New York City. She intersects poetry, urban installation and experience design to bring the body’s physical and emotional experience to the forefront. She has performed at PS122 Gallery in New York, designed a Humanizing Data program for the Van Alen Institute, as well as a Social and Emotional Learning (S.E.L) program for Casita Maria, an after-school youth art center in the Bronx. She has developed a performative and participatory urban practice consisting of alternate reality game design (WNDRLND urban scavenger hunt), a pop-up event series titled “Slow Matters“ (2023), temporary urban installations (2023-2024), and a live storytelling series titled “The Write to Read“(2024). She holds a BA in Anthropology from the University of Toronto (2018), an MSc in Development Economics from LSE (2019), and an MA in Design and Urban Ecologies from Parsons School of Design (2024). She is the recipient of the Nudge Global Impact Award (2022) and a Soho House fellow (2024).