Teresa Stout (softchaos)
Teresa Stout is an artist and writer working across sculpture, music and text. In their work, they blend theoretical, historical and personal material, paralleling spaces of performance. Through this, they highlight consumption of the body, mediated via technology and spectacle. Their work draws from their life experiences of homelessness, illness, participation in prison abolition movements, and their trans identity, tackling the subjects of the construction of subjectivity (in political, social, and historical forms) collective memory, selfhood, opacity and alternative temporalities. At the heart of this is intervention, attention to the artist as archivist, with research and ontological study as method.
Stout's analytical strategy is one of rapid fire reframing and repositioning in an attempt of both opacity and public study. They quote from sources ranging from Edouard Glissant, Tony Cokes, Hito Steryl and Denise Ferreira da Silva to Jeff Mills and J Dilla. Their works are often assemblages of archival sound sampling, text commentary, durational performance, poetry, and sound design, with the aim of opposing the ideals conveyed by Western economies of epistemology.
As a musician, Stout performs under the moniker softchaos. Their work extends those that came before them in electronic music, probing sites of possible opportunities for collective disobedience and radical potentials. They have performed globally, including at Primavera Sound, Boiler Room, Les Ardentes, Corsica Studios, Fabric London, NTS (London), Ancienne Belgique, and Amsterdam Dance Event, among others. They are a member and curator of the arts collective TORO, and resident of Oroko Radio.
Selected works include: "This Mix Isn’t for Dancing", Cult Classic Magazine (2023), Why Are These Plants Here and Other Ontological Stress, Matadero Madrid Centro de Creación Contemporánea (2021), The Modern Middle Passage: Anti-Blackness Operationalized in the Architecture of European Union's Externalization Processes, Cambridge University (2019), Discourses of Securitization: Arms Trade and Border Governance of the EU, Oxford Law Faculty, Oxford (2018).
Stout holds a BA in Liberal Arts from The New School (2016), Master of Science from University of Oxford Law Faculty (2018) and a Master of Philosophy in Politics and International Studies from the University of Cambridge (2019). Born in 1990 in West Covina, Stout currently resides in Barcelona.
