Attention is interesting because every culture has ideas about what does and does not deserve it. We are encouraged and educated to pay attention to certain things, to the aesthetics of our caregivers, to the values and forms of the aspirations of the culture we live in, sometimes at a high cost. Following the eyes of authority is very different from following our own eyes.

I think of attention as an ingredient in my work, and often it becomes the subject itself, as if attention were looking at itself in a mirror. I think about the way attention moves things around in space. It has an alchemical quality: it can shift from one thing to another, altering the hierarchy of a work so that something that initially seemed secondary can suddenly become its center. Attention feels like one of the most valuable things of our time.

I am interested in choreographing attention, but not necessarily in choreographing explanations.

Explanation comes much later for me. There is so much anxiety around knowing what something is or who someone is. Wanting to figure things out, perhaps because having a model of reality allows us to feel on top of a situation, to deal with a system, a person, or even ourselves. Identification reduces the complexity of the mind.

I prefer when the first moments of attention feel more like encountering a phenomenon than encountering the clear result of a series of thoughts. When things become explicit or too clear, I tend to lose interest. This applies to my own work as well. Often, the parts of a work that I cannot completely explain to myself are the ones I remain most interested in.

I guess a question that came up very often when I was still studying philosophy was: what can visual art do that philosophy can't, and vice versa? While studying philosophy, I had all these images and objects in my mind, bound up with feelings that resisted conceptualization, where intuition and the ineffable were more at play. I am still fascinated by that. That was what brought me into art.

Philosophy is still very alive in my studio. It is pretty much all I read, together with cultural commentary and sprinkles of poetry. I enjoy the dry and the gray.

Cognition, perception, and constructed reality are still central to my interests, and they can be seen in my work. What has changed is the role they play. Earlier, they were the explicit subject, the starting point I was trying to understand. Over time, they became integrated into the work itself; they stopped being the destination and became part of the vocabulary, one ingredient among others. I'm less interested now in making a work about perception than in letting perception operate within the work. The same goes for cognition and for the idea of constructed reality. They're no longer themes I directly point at, but conditions of the pieces I make.

I think the first time I worked with infrastructure was on a piece called Satellite, during my MFA around 2016. It was built around a TV bracket, but instead of a screen, there was a surface that models a segment of the moon, made with crushed meteorites I bought on eBay. I was thinking about satellite infrastructures, artificial satellites, and also the Moon as a natural one, but also about media and communication systems, how they transmit and also shape attention, behavior, even culture. And I think that was the beginning, not as a clear thesis, but as an intuition about structures that sustain, articulate, and organize perception.

Amsterdam feels smooth. If I had to describe how it feels to live in Amsterdam, I would say it is like standing on a moving walkway. The Dutch are the most efficient creatures I know. They are really good at designing systems and at breaking things down to many degrees of simplicity. This is reflected in the bureaucracy, the supermarkets, infrastructure, or historically also questionable things like the VOC and the development of the stock market around it.

This is a generalization, of course. Many people think the Germans are more efficient, but they still like their BMWs, Porsches, Maybachs, and all of those products that give you differentiation and degrees of status or are consumer-facing. The Dutch don't really produce that kind of product, and I think that says a lot. There is a form of simplicity to them; they are born with a bike connected to their umbilical cord.

It is also a flat landscape, much of it below sea level, that they have managed to keep afloat. Amsterdam is a very international city demographically, but I think there is something really strong and quite singular about the system, and somehow it standardizes everyone's behavior.

It is much harder for me to see Mexico City, as I am from there, but what I can say is that it is a valley in between high mountains, pretty much the opposite of Amsterdam. The city has multiple microclimates, literally and metaphorically. The city is fragmented; people from different areas of the city have dramatically different living standards and lifestyles. It is a class society, and infrastructure comes behind. Mexico City is a place difficult to domesticate, due to the geography and history. It is not as diverse demographically; somehow there is more contrast in the codes, systems, and economies on which it operates. One can sense that very directly in the materials that appear throughout the city. Appearances matter.

I think what going from one place to the other does to me is make me think about infrastructure to the max.

The basis of a system produces echoes in whatever sits on top of it. I think it is a bit like a fractal: if the pattern changes, the system changes with it. Standards are interesting to me because they are part of the material basis on which things are constructed.

So for me, de-standardization is not really about destroying a standard. It is more about the patterns I imagine could change if there were some kind of re-equalization of the system, by distorting the settings of reality.

This is also why I'm interested in infrastructure. I think of infrastructure almost as the material grammar of things, a language that connects and organizes the world. Something similar happens with our bodies. We are changing the standards of our bodies all the time by eating healthy, looksmaxxing, taking drugs, meditating, or thinking only about work.

I think I do something similar with materials. I'm not trying to replace one standard with another, but to make small mutations in that grammar, changing a use, a function, or a connection.

What I recognize as worth disrupting is something that has become so standardized that we no longer notice it, but that at the same time is deeply embedded in the material unconscious of our built environments.

I would not know.

I think one of the most interesting processes in the construction of reality is how ideas become material and, at the same time, vice versa, how materials, objects, or reality itself evoke ideas.

That translation is not necessarily symmetrical, and actually, I find it much more interesting when it isn't. It is a bit like a dream: something calls our attention while we are awake, and then we dream about aspects of it in a completely different context. Similarly, our dreams and desires take shape in the world in ways that are not necessarily direct or literal. My interests in politics, culture, philosophy, geopolitics - all of those things - are always there, but more like an environment or a climate in the background.

I also don't feel that I have to adhere to one set of ideas or position myself against another. In a way, polar positions end up confirming the existence of those same frameworks and reinforcing their polarization. I do that when I vote or go to a protest. But when making artworks, I leave those frameworks behind and let them continue operating somewhere in the background.

Through working with the materials, adding things, removing things, and understanding what a material can do, other associations begin to appear. The materials start to evoke other ideas, other sensations, other materialities. And I think that creates a kind of third possibility, something that wasn't necessarily contained in the original idea or in the material by itself.

So there isn't a precise moment when I stop following an idea and start listening to the object. It is more of a back-and-forth translation between the two. I find that balance when the work becomes evocative rather than descriptive.

I think cutting is an operation much older than sculpture. I see it in medicine, in archaeology, in censorship, in rituals, even in language. For me, a cut is never just a physical action; it changes the conditions under which something can be perceived in a different light.

I'm interested in what happens when I interrupt a continuity, poking at the abstraction of what renders as a perfect and seamless topology. Gaps can produce a kind of productive psychosis. The mind will always try to fill in missing information; it will fantasize about what isn't there. It creates an absence that the imagination has to negotiate.

This is something super interesting: how to deal with ideas and materials without the materials becoming illustrations of those ideas, but also without them becoming purely material gestures. How can materials speak without becoming just vessels for ideas that could probably be expressed more clearly in words?

I think there is a similar tension when communicating what an artwork stands for. The desire to make that position completely clear and resolved can very easily become didactic or illustrative, or turn too quickly into a moral position. And here we enter the territory of the spectator: the time and attention that someone has, or is willing to give, to delve into a work of art. This is also in tension with the degree of depth and the number of layers an artist might be interested in working with. It is not that spectators cannot read a work that requires more time or thought, but there is something about the pace at which we consume things as spectators. To what degree we take that pace, and the spectator more generally, into account is an interesting question in itself.

It seems to me that we are in a moment in which this is often asked of artworks. Visual art is dealing more and more with larger narratives and political realities of the world, but I think we need to think about what different media allow or limit when it comes to elaborating an argument or arriving at a conclusion. Time-based media can perhaps do this differently because they have duration and can unfold an argument. With something like sculpture or painting, certain things remain more abstract while others are more explicit. And when you try to eliminate that abstraction completely, the work can very quickly become illustrative or didactic, almost like a meme. I find all these tensions really interesting to think about.

Ambiguity is also a position, and being explicit doesn't necessarily make a work less complex. Sometimes clarity is necessary, and depending on how one understands one's responsibility toward the viewer, ambiguity can seem avoidant. So for me it is not about choosing ambiguity over clarity, but about what is gained and lost at different degrees of explicitness. I like political realities to appear as ingredients without completely determining how the work has to be read or becoming its final destination.

I prefer to approach things more like phenomena. When you are walking down the street and see a square cut into the pavement, you don't necessarily know whether it is an entrance to the drainage system, whether it has something to do with gas or internet infrastructure, or whether someone simply carved those lines. The world itself appears to us with different degrees of abstraction. You can investigate and perhaps find an answer, but sometimes you won't.

And I think that gap is valuable. It is like finding a document in which certain parts have been erased, or like encountering an archaeological fragment. You have some information, but not enough to reconstruct the whole with certainty, so you begin to speculate and imagine.

That speculative process I find valuable. I think this is how I try to bring political realities into the work: there are traces, materials, and directions that point toward them, but I don't necessarily want those elements to form a continuous sequence. I am more interested in the leaps between them. I prefer to leave different degrees of the unknown within the work, so that there is still something to think through rather than something to fully grasp.

That speculative process interests me a lot. I think this is how I try to bring political realities into the work: there are traces, materials, and directions that point toward them, but I don't want all those elements to converge into a single conclusion. I prefer to leave different degrees of abstraction within the work, so that it can remain something to encounter and think through rather than becoming an illustration or a didactic object.

I experience life through fragments. I don't wake up every day remembering my whole life story. I wake up in the place where I fell asleep, look at the same face in the mirror, see my cats wandering around, and these small things remind me of who and where I am. It is through small bits containing cues to larger schemes.

I guess it is similar to how, through a dinosaur bone, archaeologists can imagine an entire past. Something similar happens in my work. A fragment of a material can point toward something at a completely different scale. So a system doesn't need to be complete in order to appear.

When it comes to knowing when a piece is finished, it's mostly intuition. There is a moment when the piece starts to evoke things I didn't anticipate. At that point, I just know.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about how cosmovisions and religions continue to operate within secular individuals and societies. I find it fascinating how they have shaped societies and how they continue to echo through time in the form of attitudes, values, behaviors, and ways of understanding reality.

It is almost 2027, and some of the major conflicts in the world are still playing out through religion. I also find it really striking to see the emergence of fascist governments and movements, many of them carrying strong religious flags. Cosmovisions are deeply ingrained; they drive the world.

I think cosmovisions have historically provided a kind of mental order, a form of software: ways of organizing what is visible and invisible, what has value, how we understand ourselves in relation to others, and even what we imagine to be possible. What interests me is that these infrastructures don't simply disappear when a society becomes secular. They mutate, become less visible, and continue operating in other forms.

So perhaps my next incision will be to let these ideas play in the background and see what comes out of them.

Conversations. People can say the most interesting things without noticing. If I weren't in art, I would probably be something like a hairdresser. It would be the perfect excuse to listen to people.

News. I am obsessed.

Welcome to the Hills by Yussef Dayes.

I don’t know about everyone, but I really like Holy Motors by Leos Carax.

There are many spaces I like, but the one I have known the longest, and probably have the most peculiar relationship with, is Kurimanzutto in Mexico City. I grew up a couple of blocks down the street from it. Before it became a gallery, it was a lumberyard, and some of the furniture in my house was built with wood from there. I would often go there to get pieces of wood for different purposes. Later it became a gallery, which was something really new, strange, and also exciting for me, knowing that every now and then there would be an exhibition just a few blocks from home.

Many years later, I moved into a flat with three friends, and by coincidence it turned out to be the former studio of Carlos Amorales, one of the artists represented by the gallery. He had previously made a life-size, 1:1 replica of that same studio inside Kurimanzutto. I had actually seen the exhibition, but only a few months before moving into the real place. It was a crazy coincidence. I only realized because we kept receiving Carlos Amorales's mail. I think I still have some of it. Sorry, Carlos.

My mother still has that house.

Mexico City keeps surprising me. It is highly energetic; there is something really youthful about it while also having pyramids underneath. I love big cities, but many of the megacities I have been to seem a bit exhausted, and people look tired. I don't have that same feeling in Mexico City. It is a city that becomes more interesting with time. People in Mexico City are open, and I think that is a great sign. I don't see the city stagnating in its own forms anytime soon.