In 2008, a German SPD politician announced that the era of top-down authority was finished. The times when one person could shut down all discussion with a single word — basta! — were over. He meant it as liberation but the phrase did not stay that way. Whether it signals freedom or its removal depends entirely on who is holding it, and from where.

As far as I keep observing humans around me, I keep making pieces about this. The way systems persist regardless of the intentions of the people inside them makes me chronically sad (I have been the only one responsible for my sadness anyway). It's the way resistance is real and gets absorbed, the way hope is the machine's favorite fuel. So, I built a room where it could happen in front of an audience. I designed the mattes — printed cards, each carrying a symbol, activated by foot — and I have been one of the two conductors in every performance, which means I am inside the thing I made, every time, with no more control over the outcome than anyone else. Two of us on stage with full authority: hands, arms, feet, the whole body. Real octopuses as instruments of power. We compete for musicians, claim them, steal them from each other. And the musicians can refuse — they can stay where they were, ignore both of us, follow only what they hear. The choice is real. I made sure of that.

And the loop takes everything anyway. What the body remembers and plays back is never exact — that gap, small and unintended, is the only freedom that survives the structure, but if it is not enough to change anything, is enough to make the music.

I have been here before — in The Mexican National Anthem, in Maquina Latina, in Metronomo y Esperanza, and many others. Each time the human gesture is authentic. Each time the system is more durable. I keep arriving at the same place and I keep finding it worth showing.

As a mother-cell piece, Mosaicos mattes are linear, but at the same time, the piece has several numbered scores — 1, 2, 3... — that I could call with one, two, three fingers, allowing me to mix abstract symbols with specific standard music notation. I activate the mattes with my feet, and depending on the sonic situation, I can trigger a score. I also have my gloves with sensors, adding a live electronics layer to the piece. Like an octopus-conductor, I generate sound with my gloves, play the mattes with my feet, conduct the ensemble, and trigger scores. The drawings go “from a flower to a hammer”, and their meaning resides freely in the brain of any performer. Everything but the scores is about levels of intensity. The performers-machine I have at my fingertips is also a machine that lives within an intensity fader of flowers and hammers. That is my threshold.