Letter from the Editor
Text by Gwen Hoeffgen with Sarah Luu, Domenic Toliver and Adela Cardona Puerta
In this final term of the academic year, the SOFA interviews return again and again to a question that is both simple and difficult to stabilize: what does it mean to make, share, and sustain a life with others? Across these conversations, art is not treated as an isolated object or a professional category, but as something inseparable from the conditions of living together– family systems, friendships, migrations, losses, and the everyday labor of care.
One of the most striking patterns in this term’s publication is also one of the most intimate: many of these interviews are conducted between people who already have built relationships. Siblings speak to one another about shared childhoods and the ongoing worldbuilding of family life. Friends interview friends, and some talk with their intimate partners. Children speak with parents about entrepreneurship, immigration, and the difficulty of letting go of what has been built over decades. This proximity is the method itself. The interviews suggest that knowledge does not only emerge from distance or expertise, but from the fragile trust of existing relationships, where memory, disagreement, and care are already in circulation, and can be returned to.
There is also a recurring attention to endings: letting go of a restaurant after years of family labor, stepping away from identities shaped by activism or burnout, or rethinking what it means for grief to persist without resolution. Rather than treating endings as failures, these conversations describe them as necessary continuations and openings– ways of redistributing care, responsibility, and attention into new forms. Even grief, in this context, is not positioned as something to overcome, but as something to remain in relation with.
Finally, these interviews repeatedly return to collaboration as a condition of survival and creative continuity. Art emerges here as something sustained through mutual support. As this term closes the year, this issue of SOFA offers not a conclusion, but a set of ongoing questions: how do we care for what we inherit? How do we share what we know without turning it into ownership? And how might art remain accountable to the people and relationships that make it possible in the first place?
