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Mexico City
born, Berlin-based artist working
across sound, video, drawing,
performance, instrument
construction, and mechanical
sculpture. Born in a
working-class barrio in downtown
Mexico City, he grew up between
street life and a household of
artists — Elekta
Arenal, Elizabeth Catlett,
Leopoldo Mendez, Concha Michel,
Pablo O'higgins, and Mariana Yampolsky among the
family's circle — an early
immersion in social reality and
artistic practice that shaped
everything that followed.
He began
his musical formation at the
Escuela Nacional de Música,
UNAM, before pursuing
composition, analysis, and
theory privately with Julio
Estrada (1985–90). He built and
voiced pianos at the
Bösendorfer factory in
Vienna, studied analogue
photography and digital video
across three countries, and
worked for three years as
assistant to Conlon Nancarrow in
Mexico City (1991–94) —
experiences that rooted his
practice firmly in the material
and mechanical rather than the
purely academic.
From 1999
to 2018 he held consecutive
fellowships from Mexico's
Sistema Nacional de Creadores de
Arte, one of the country's
highest artistic distinctions.
He has been commissioned by the
ensembles Mosaik,
Liminar, Vertixe Sonora
and Contrechamps,
also by the Americas Society,
the Siemens Stiftung, the
Grazer Kunstverein, and
numerous other institutions and
musicians across Europe and the
Americas. His work has been
presented in Austria, China,
Cuba, France, Germany, Italy,
Mexico, the Netherlands,
Palestine, Spain, the United
Kingdom, and the United States.
He moved to
Berlin in 2003 and became also a
German citizen in 2009, without
ceasing to be Mexican. His
practice lives in the sfumato
between disciplines,
professions, and cultures —
never fully resolved into any
single one of them. Its
organizing condition is
the threshold between humans
understood as machines and
machines perceived as human, a
tension running across nearly
four decades of work in multiple
media. |