Chaska Sofia

Chaska Sofia’s project, Mossy Online Radio (MOR) will be a virtual radio station with live stream broadcasts and recorded sets that highlight the local talent of Philly nightlife. The station will center gender-nonconforming, queer, and trans people of color musicians and artists, primarily from Philadelphia, but also from around the globe. Each performance will be livestreamed and then featured on the MOR website to build an accessible archive of queer art. Chaska will conduct video and audio recording, website management, curation, and booking. 

Chaska Sofia / Precolumbian is a DJ/musician has the opportunity to tour her home continent of South America. As a part of the tour, Chaska will travel to Bogota, Lima, Peru, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and Ecuador, connecting with queer collectives and record labels such as Putivuelta, Body Hack, Jadeo, Hiedrah, Sacrilejo Records, Cumbia tu Mente, and more supporting the work of revolutionizing queer, trans* spaces and nightlight within South America.  

This grant will go towards covering Chaska’s travel costs to and throughout South America.

Chaska will curate a bimonthly, live-streamed, music event showcasing queer and trans DJs and musicians from Philadelphia and beyond. Using dance, beats, and sound as a language of collective healing, Chaska will create alternative spaces where gender nonconforming, queer, and trans people can celebrate themselves and their survival. These events will promote, uplift, and honor the work of contemporary queer and trans artists in the Philadelphia music scene, and will be archived and viewable online as a form of queer cultural preservation.

Chaska, also known as dj precolumbian, seeks to expand the cultural position of the DJ—not just playing records and throwing parties—but using the dance floor as a tool for community building and transcending borders. Through her work she re-contextualizes popular culture through an anti-oppression lens to create spaces for collective healing through movement and sound. For more than five years she has spun a mixture of tropical bass, future cumbia, ballroom beats, homo hop, and remixed pop music at house parties, clubs across the country, and produced her own dance parties. Chaska has also broadcast a long-running show on WPEB 88.1 called Radio Estregeno, put out mixtapes, and facilitated art education for youth and adults fusing DJ technique with political analysis to help usher in a new generation of conscious DJs. As a cultural producer, Chaska aims to create spaces that are safe for womyn, queer, trans folks, and “other self-defined weirdos” to celebrate their bodies and genders without the fear of harassment.

Chaska will facilitate a DJ skills course for queer youth and teens of color. The class will teach young people the technical skills of DJing infused with the transformative cultural, social, historical, and political aspects of DJing, music, and community space-building. The goal of the project is to allow the students to re-imagine the role of the DJ beyond playing music, but such as their involvement in building community and sparking creative, critical dialogue through movement and sound.