Mextoys grew out of La Pasión según la gente — the same vision, stripped to its material core. If La Pasión revealed the Passion play as a collective game that everyone agrees to play while knowing it's fake, Mextoys asked what a game actually is: an automated behavior, a learned repetition, a body doing what it was programmed to do.

Three percussionists play Mexican popular toys — manual automata, butterfly toys, superhero figures, airplane toys, carousel toys — not as props but as instruments, with the same seriousness a child brings to play before he knows the difference between playing and performing. The toys refer to something specific: the early automated learning produced by mass elementary education systems, the body trained to imitate before it learns to think. A dancer moves through the same logic, interacting with the percussionists. Two video interludes divide the piece into three parts.

The videos are non fiction, no staging. A popular street celebration in Mexico. Naked bodies playing and having sex, unselfconsciously, with the same repetitive logic as the toys, a brief silent take of people dancing at a party: without music, the dancing bodies reveal themselves as machines, their movements suddenly legible as programmed behavior rather than expression. Mextoys deliberately echoes sex toys: the mechanization of intimacy is not separate from the mechanization of play, of learning, of desire.

Mextoys: Video Interlude 1 Adult content		Mextoys: Video Interlude 2 Adult content

What the stage theatricalizes, the video documents. What the video documents, the stage handles differently. Some elements belong only to one world, some cross between them — but the two worlds never fully coincide. The audience sits at the threshold between fiction and document, unable to resolve them into a single frame. The piece does not help.

Mextoys was my first fully realized multimedia piece, and the first in which I consciously placed humans as machines at the center — not as a metaphor but as an observable condition. Looking at humans is like looking at a machine zoo. Mextoys was where I first realized the nature of my relationship to society.

Mextoys: a toy in-between