I wouldn't say they're completely inseparable, but there is a long history of culture being very well adapted to the economy, or the other way around. This becomes especially visible as the arts started to become increasingly autonomous from the mid-eighteenth century onward into the twentieth century, and finally into the contemporary age, where everything works around and through capitalism.

I started getting interested in this very early in my career, when I was still in school. The first piece I remember doing along these lines was an ephemeral, constructed intervention at the Museo Numismático Nacional in Mexico City (this institution used to be the old House of Coin of the Kingdom of New Spain and then of independent Mexico up until 1994). I was part of a group show called Valor Agregado, and for it I did a work called Primer Congreso Nacional de Arte Emergente. What I did was ask the museum, which is an institution dependent on the Casa de Moneda (House of Coin) and the SHCP (Ministry of Finance and Public Credit), to announce this fake congress through all of its official and institutional media. From there, I sent it out through the circles where emerging artists tend to circulate: collectives, off-sites, and schools in Mexico City.

I mounted it in a hall of the museum where the Spanish Empire would melt most of the silver they extracted from the Americas. There, among those old ovens, I set up a full conference hall, chairs, a stage, and a snack bar, but no speakers would come. I left the microphone lines open, and no one from the museum came in to give any specific explanation; they were instructed to act as if they didn't really know what was going on either. I was filming the whole thing from above, from a hidden room. And as I filmed, three people took the stage and started talking, and from there everyone rearranged the chairs into a circle and got into back-and-forth discussions about what emerging art was and how it could be linked to the idea of economy because of the context of the venue.

That was the first time I was particularly interested in this relationship, and in how it worked between spectators, commentators, and artists.

I think this has affected me in a few ways. The first is through experience. As I was studying in Mexico City, I started to realize that we were part of a peripheral practice. In the grand scheme of the contemporary art world at that time, by the end of the 2010s, Mexico was still not very well connected to global circulation, and we were definitely still not a destination for global tourism the way it has become in the last seven or eight years.

So, with the international art market and international exposure developing very slowly here, I became interested in that peripheral condition as something to work with. This is also when we founded Ladrón Galería, a project space I run with fellow artists, which played with exactly this idea of operating from a city in the Americas that sits outside the main circuits, and everything that comes with that context.

Later in my research, this connected to something else, which is that Mexico's history has moved in and out of being a center of great economic circulation and expansion through different trading routes, dating back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. So the same place that felt peripheral on the contemporary art map had been, at other moments, a hub of global trade. That tension, being central or peripheral depending on which moment in history you're looking at, is something that, through my research and practice, has come together in different projects and series.

Authorship in my practice is something I defend, dilute, displace, or use strategically depending on the project.

In earlier projects, I tried to dilute it more directly, at the level of the credit line itself, listing collaborators in ways that complicated the idea of a single author signing the work. I was occupied almost exclusively with copies of copies of previous works at the time, so it made sense to push that question right into the credits. That was a more frontal way of pushing against the genius position. As I moved into what I feel are bootleg works, which wouldn't identify as 1:1 copies, these ideas shifted more into the research itself, into a more personal, ideological way of producing. Authorship became a matter of how the research, the references, and the layers of appropriation became part of how the work is read. At this point, it functions more like a frame, a way of holding the material together and offering it to the viewer.

Behind all of this is the idea of the genius as a Western construct, which is what I'm criticizing, a position that has been extremely glorified, ultimately relevant to acquiring cultural capital and wealth, accumulating all of these ideas into a position that functions as an asset in the context of the demands of the market. That lonely genius, the eighteenth-century author writing on their own, has always been contested by the human experience, which has always been collaborative. The further back we go, the more we can see authorship as a naturally existing creative construct, a common knowledge that jumps from one mind to the next.

This relationship became relevant to my work because of how that first moment of global trade affected so much of what we understand about identity in Mexican culture. To give one example, we're very proud of our food, and most of our traditional dishes can be traced, one way or another, to that specific moment in time. Similar cases can be made in language, tradition, architecture, design, etc.

I'm also interested in how the new commercial relations in the Pacific are developing. There's a broader decoupling of the Global South from the US happening, and as we enter this new era of trade wars and bilateral reordering in the Pacific Basin, Mexico again plays a key geographical role, which will probably once again have an impact on culture and society as we understand it.

I was mainly thinking about the means and materials of production and how they affect a specific art or craft, and the responses they generate when value is measured across cultural history. My intention in this show was to put together two moments in which the creative experience was overwhelmed by propositions of worth tied to how a certain practice is made.

During the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries, ceramic makers in colonial Mexico were widely excluded from the rest of the crafts (and the laws that protected them) and were mainly considered construction workers. The reason for this is that the majority of the practice's time was spent manufacturing mosaic tiles for the accelerated erection of palaces in the newly created viceroyalty, as opposed to their European counterparts, who mainly fabricated decorative or utilitarian artifacts. It was only toward the end of the seventeenth century that ceramists were given their own status as official crafters, via the ordenanzas de los oficios granted by the office of the viceroyalty.

I wanted to draw a parallel here to how, in the early-to-mid sixties, minimalist artists faced heavy backlash over their practice, to the point of being considered publicists or low-level designers by a handful of powerful art critics and theorists, who were extremely relevant at that moment and close to the school of thought of abstract expressionism, the Clement Greenberg circle in particular. That's what made me put the two together.

I believe the Talavera tiles I used sit in a particular gray zone regarding their status as craft. Still made with the ingredients required to get the Talavera Poblana denomination of origin, they are produced in a semi-industrial way, by the hundreds or thousands, via semiautomated cutting boards, screen-printing of engobe, and firing in industrial furnaces.

For me, this connects the work back to how minimalism wanted to break from the traditional elements of art-making and industrialize the practice in outside workshops, which is part of what created the backlash it suffered at the time. So by making minimalist forms out of semi-industrial Talavera, the piece lands on the same fault line both moments were judged on, where the mode of production is what decides whether something reads as art or as mere fabrication. The colonial ceramist, devalued for turning out tiles by the thousand, and the minimalist, dismissed for sending the work out to a fabricator, end up meeting in the same object.

This museographical part of the exhibition is a preoccupation with how images generate power.

I was interested in how, in the geopolitical shifts we're living through now between East and West, both sides treat their national landscapes as both power and identity. These places get endlessly photographed, put on stamps and currency and in tourism campaigns, and circulated as proof of what a country is. The landscape becomes soft power, an image that projects natural authority and legitimacy, which is what I'm working with through the photographs.

It also worked as a backdrop in a literal sense. I overlaid the two national parks, one from the US and one from China, playing with opacity so they bled into each other in an abstract combination of the two, then printed it on vinyl and ran it floor to ceiling across the gallery walls as one huge image. The gallery had two big windows onto a street in Manhattan, and the show ran through the holiday season, so the space worked like a storefront window, with the landscape turned into a kind of gift wrap, the soft-power image of nature flattened into a decorative surface at the moment of peak consumption.