In January 2020, Documenta Studies invited me to participate in their program Learning Unlearning in Kassel—just months before the world was reshaped by social distancing protocols. By the time the talk was meant to take place, gathering in a shared physical space had become impossible.

This limitation became an opening. Instead of being physically together, we found ourselves inhabiting a different kind of shared space, one built in virtual reality. Here, the talk took the form of a guided visit within a virtual space designed specifically for the occasion. An immersive installation, a shifting landscape of audiovisual interventions. The audience, embodied as avatars, was not merely present but active, moving freely, speaking, interacting, and contributing to the experience itself. In this setting, the boundaries between guide and visitor, speaker and listener, dissolved. The visit was non-guided, and the exhibition, perhaps, never truly existed, except in the experience of those who inhabited it.

On June 22, 1941, German troops invaded the Soviet Union. Under the threat of bombings, workers at the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg decided to evacuate the entire collection by train to other cities. Despite having no artworks left to display, the museum staff continued offering guided visits. Educators led visitors through rooms filled only with empty frames and pedestals  without sculptures.

Una visita al todo y a la nada (A visit to everything and nothing) is a performative tour led by an educator and performer, where a museum’s traces, details, and museological errors become visible. Through mediation, these absences and remnants are not seen as voids but as artistic gestures—fragments of meaning waiting to be revealed.

In ¿Qué se le ofrece? (What Can I Do for You?), we altered the rules of the Museo Universitario de Ciudad de México to allow a mobile café to open at the museum’s entrance. This simple gesture redefined the threshold between the institution and public space, turning an overlooked area into a site of interaction, reflection, and exchange.

The café functioned as an informal meeting point where conversations emerged naturally, guided not only by the aroma of coffee but by a series of altered mediations—situations designed to shift the way visitors perceived the exhibitions and the architecture of the museum. These mediations encouraged a more open, fluid, and personal engagement with the space, blurring the lines between audience, institution, and artwork.

This action was carried out in collaboration with the museum’s mediation team, whose role extended beyond traditional educational practices to embrace performative and participatory elements. Axel Arroyo, acting as both barista and mediator, became a central figure in this experiment, embodying the intersection between hospitality, dialogue, and artistic intervention. Through each interaction, the act of serving coffee transformed into an opportunity for storytelling, questioning, and collective meaning-making.

This project invites visitors to engage with Gregor Schneider’s exhibition Kindergarten through a radical shift in perception, changing their point of view, altering their pace, and challenging the habitual ways in which they experience an exhibition.

Rather than passively observing the works, the proposal activates the entire body, encouraging a heightened physical and sensorial awareness. By modifying movement, position, and perspective, viewers establish a more intense and immersive relationship with the artwork, transforming the exhibition space into a dynamic field of interaction rather than a static environment of contemplation.

Through these bodily interventions, Proposals for seeing an exhibition disrupts the conventional roles of observer and exhibition, opening new possibilities for encountering and embodying the art.

This action seeks to subvert the usual roles and dynamics of the exhibition space through a performative proposal: mediators become artistic objects, the audience takes on the role of mediators, and the exhibition itself becomes the spectator.

In this un-guided tour, three out-of-work museum educators are temporarily employed to perform their roles with total freedom for two hours. Stripped of institutional constraints, they navigate the space in unpredictable ways, shaping interactions that challenge the traditional power dynamics of museum mediation.

The action unfolds across three floors of Arts Santa Mònica. To participate, visitors must locate the red-marked information points, where the educators await, ready to engage, disrupt, and redefine the act of mediation itself.

In 1921, Luigi Pirandello premiered Six Characters in Search of an Author at the Teatro Valle in Rome. This absurdist, metatheatrical play explored the complex relationships between authors, their characters, and theatre practitioners. It defied conventional theatrical boundaries, as characters stepped out of fiction, sat among the audience, and blurred the distinction between reality and performance. The audience’s reaction was polarized—some were intrigued, while others shouted “Manicomio!” (“Madhouse!”), disturbed by Pirandello’s audacious dismantling of theatrical illusion.

A century later, The Performance to Be Performed extends Pirandello’s disruption of fiction and reality into the streets of Rome. The audience embarks on a guided journey through the city’s old town, led by six different characters—some fictional, some real—who communicate with them exclusively through WhatsApp. These characters weave stories, instructions, and reflections, transforming the city into a living stage where narrative and environment merge.

The journey culminates at the historic Teatro Valle, the very place where Six Characters in Search of an Author first unsettled audiences. Here, the performance reaches its conclusion—not in a conventional theatrical manner, but as an open-ended encounter between past and present, fiction and reality, the performed and the unperformed.

The title of Hans Christian Andersen’s fable, The emperor’s new clothes, serves as the starting point for this project, which explores the relationship between viewers and works of art through installation and performance.

Structured as a guided tour, the performance borrows from the familiar format of museum visits, yet subtly shifts its dynamics to question the mechanisms of artistic perception. Drawing on prior experience in explaining contemporary art to diverse audiences, the tour plays with expectation, authority, and the invisible frameworks that shape how we engage with art.

At its core, the project raises fundamental questions:

Is there any point to art? Who consumes it? Who should? Is art eternal?
Does our perception of what is and isn’t art change? Should it? If society evolves, shouldn’t our conception of art evolve with it?

Through these provocations, The emperor’s new clothes invites participants to reconsider not just what they see, but how they see—and whether they, like the subjects of Andersen’s tale, are willing to question what is presented before them.