Berlin, 2018. Portrait by Ernesto Mendez

Born in a working-class barrio downtown Mexico City, I grew up between raw street life and a household of artists. My aunt Andrea Gómez — painter, engraver, member of the Taller de Gráfica Popular — was the first artist I knew, and she was at home. Elekta Arenal, Elizabeth Catlett, Leopoldo Méndez, Concha Michel, Pablo O'Higgins, and Mariana Yampolsky were among the family's circle — an early immersion in socio-political reality, and artistic practice that shaped everything that followed.

I began my musical formation at the Escuela Nacional de Música, UNAM, before pursuing composition, analysis, and theory privately with Julio Estrada (1985–90). I 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 my practice firmly in the material and mechanical rather than the purely academic.

From 1999 to 2018 I held consecutive fellowships from Mexico's Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte — back when it still meant something. I have been commissioned by Mosaik, LIMINAR, Vertixe Sonora, and Contrechamps, and by the Americas Society, the Siemens Stiftung, the Grazer Kunstverein, and numerous other institutions and musicians across Europe and the Americas. My work has been presented in Austria, China, Cuba, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Palestine, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. I moved to Berlin in 2003 and became a German citizen in 2009, without ceasing to be Mexican.