5:00 PM Doors Open 
6:30 PM Performance by Roco Cordova

Please join Southern Exposure at an opening reception for our latest exhibition, Love Letters to Aliens, on Saturday, October 25, 2025 at 5:00 PM. Featuring a performance by Roco Cordova and a dj set by Alchemia, this Saturday evening promises a ton of art, joy, and collective inspiration.

Cordova will be performing Things You May Find Hidden In My Ear (2023-2024). Hear from the artist on this piece below:

"This piece borrows its title from Mosab Abu Toha’s collection of poems Things You May Find Hidden In My Ear (City Lights Books). This composition takes inspiration from the poem that titles this collection, finding in it its form and structure. However, I do not attempt to make a mere setting of poetry to music. To my understanding, the poem describes the daily aspects of a life in Gaza, complete with its quotidian beauties and its gruesome horrors. Therefore I sought to create a work that embraces the collision of two different worlds: the exploration of both chance coincidences and stark divergences between the poet’s experience living in occupied Palestine, and my own, living both in colonized Puerto Rico and at the heart of empire in the San Francisco Bay Area. The sonic images in this poem serve as a source for the sounds that compose the piece, blending them with my singing voice, field recordings of my daily life, and samples collected from online media. The work is organized in three parts, stitched together using techniques associated with musique concréte, soundscapes and electronic dance music. The result, it is my hope, is a piece that forces people to continually confront the reality of the ongoing genocide in occupied Palestine, while exploring the historic connections between the Palestinian and Puerto Rican struggles for liberation." -Roco Cordova

Love Letters to Aliens is an exhibition and event series featuring work by Rana Hamadeh, Xandra Ibarra, Osvaldo Ramirez Castillo, Maryam Tafakory, and Yue Xiang, with performances by Roco Córdova, and considers the notion of the alien in its most expansive sense—from the extraterrestrial to the intimate.

ROCO CORDOVA was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico and is a vocalist, composer, producer and improviser based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Cordova’s music fuses diverse influences with electronic media, chance operations, gradual processes, noise, improvisation, and timbral techniques of composition. Voice is at the core of their practice: they weave together extended techniques like throat singing, overtone singing, falsetto, and vocal percussion into live performances that edge between ritual and happening.

ALCHEMIA is an Iranian DJ, multidisciplinary artist and radio journalist. She fuses her musical influences with her practice of storytelling and archiving when creating mixes. Her monthly show Taste of Cherry airs live every 1st Wednesday of the month on Oakland’s Lower Grand Radio.