The Historic Center of Mexico City, without a doubt - a place where everything profane finds room, so saturated that its monstrosity dissolves into ornament. Chaos as order. In a single glance: a cathedral built from the remains of an Aztec pyramid, slowly sinking; tourists taking photos while a man pleads for help in the middle of a traffic jam; police officers flirting with the quesadilla vendor outside an illegal shopping center where everything you might need is made in China.

A mix of all three: in the ritualized performance of narco politics unfolding inside a five-hundred-year-old bureaucratic building.

“Jesus Christ, this is painful to look at” (I found myself saying the other day while staring at a particularly ugly recent painting).

A gallerist once told me, “Karla, to be a true artist you have to choose one: fame, money, or a place in the books.” Then he sold a painting and never paid me. LOL.

Lesson learned: wherever those three obsessions rule, art cannot be found.

Animals are a mirror, a chance to unfold technique. I see the same power celebrated - from Aesop and La Fontaine to Los Tigres del Norte - in the fable… or maybe it is just my low-key misanthropy.

Perhaps in the nostalgia of those terribly misnamed “protest artists,” or worse, “anarchists.” At least the muralists had the guts to climb a scaffold - or maybe the government just paid them well enough to create works worthy of their wounded egos. What remains today are half-hearted attempts, reeking of graffiti promoted by some cheap brand of vinyl paint.

I used to worry about conducting my work on referential research. Over the years, I’ve come to see it as unproductive to think that your art must respond to the idea of a “fatherland.” In recent years, this gesture has been instrumentalized by the art market to fulfill political correctness quotas or inclusionist agendas. Becoming part of the 21st-century obsession with labels - “Latin American art made by a woman, with brown skin, of sexual orientation X, Y, Z…” - not only strikes me as absurd, but, because it’s a trend, it also blocks the untimely readings that might arise in the encounter with the work, readings that could speak to future audiences rather than merely confirming contemporary expectations.