For its third edition, Mexico City’s TONO Festival continued its sure-footed approach to showcasing time-based media art: performance, dance, sound, video art, and installation. Over the course of two weeks, young and hip audiences attended a series of events and exhibitions at multiple venues across the city. While each program had its own feel, with some better attended than others, the festival’s sharp offerings drew a clubby crowd and big names, including curators Klaus Biesenbach and Aram Moshayedi, and local personalities like chef Elena Reygadas and artist Damián Ortega.
Founded and curated by Samantha Ozer, TONO has become an important platform for the city’s eclectic arts scene, a particular strength being Ozer’s ability to draw artists from the international circuit to Mexico City. One such guest was Brazilian interdisciplinary artist Jota Mombaça, whose profoundly unsettling performance Corriendo hacia la asamblea de las cosas [Running toward the meeting of things] (2025) was a festival highlight. At twilight in the first section of Chapultepec Forest — Mexico City’s largest public park — Mombaça created an apocalyptic soundscape with four collaborators, whose guttural utterances, whispers, and howls created a sound bed for Mombaça’s powerful timbre to ring out across the darkening forest. “The hour of human suffering no longer existed,” she declared solemnly and steadily to an assembled crowd seated on hard-pressed earth. Teeth chattered and limbs shifted, but never did attention ebb. Later this year, the performance will take the form of a sound installation at WIELS in Brussels.
The program included several such performances — carefully choreographed and co-produced — but also events that felt much more intimate and experimental. Choreographer Adam Linder’s Mothering the Tongue (2023), billed as a lecture-performance, had the feel of an open rehearsal, all trial and improvisation. The show had a wonderful pastiche-like quality, as if Linder had collected a series of memorized vignettes and online videos about how athletes, influencers, and dancers move in space in the twenty-first century. At times, Linder struggled with the city’s altitude, and had to rest. The sound of his labored breathing in the otherwise silent dance studio was a clear reminder of the vulnerability of any performance.
In contrast, nothing seemed particularly vulnerable at Aguas Frescas [Cool drinks] (2025), a two-day performance piece by Mexican artist Bárbara Sánchez-Kane that felt almost like a festival within a festival. Like Linder’s performance, Aguas Frescas was staged at the Anahuacalli Museum, which houses a permanent display of Diego Rivera’s collection of pre-Columbian artifacts. Unlike Linder’s, Sánchez-Kane’s performance took place outdoors, in the museum’s central courtyard, with the building’s dramatic façade — designed to resemble a pre-Columbian temple — as a backdrop.
Staged on a custom-made, off-white circular carpet, Sánchez-Kane conceived of Aguas Frescas as an homage to Felix González-Torres’s seminal work Untitled (Perfect Lovers) (1991), in which two identical wall clocks are installed side-by-side, their synchronicity lost with the passing of time. In Aguas Frescas, the carpet serves as the face of the clock, and twelve chairs serve as stand-ins for the clock’s numerals. These aren’t any old chairs, of course, but a set of classic No. 10s, a famed modernist design by the Sillas Malinche company in Monterrey, half of which have had their wooden spindles removed from the backrest to be replaced by tuned brass pipes. Sánchez-Kane’s clock is not an instrument for telling time, you see, but for making sound — the brass-piped chairs are miked, and set upon them are six large glass pitchers, known as vitroleras, filled with a traditional Mexican drink called horchata. Typically, vitroleras can hold a couple of gallons of this agua fresca — cool drink — which is scooped out with a ladle, also used to mix the drink and reduce sedimentation. It is not unusual, then, to see ladles spinning inside vitroleras at stands selling aguas frescas across Mexico. One such liquid vortex caught Sánchez-Kane’s attention on a trip and inspired the piece, in which the handles of each vitrolera ladle become percussive mallets, hitting the brass pipes on the backrest of the chairs as they spin with centrifugal force throughout the performance.
Within this circular, carpeted instrument, Sánchez-Kane invited her friends and collaborators to stage performances that ranged wildly across the spectrum of creative expression. The most successful intervention was, unsurprisingly, by composer Darío Acuña Fuentes-Berain, whose seemingly madcap sprints around the stage resulted in — quite literally — a symphony of musical chairs unlikely to be heard elsewhere.
Ozer has very cleverly built TONO’s performance program to serve as a hook for attendance at some of the most dramatic settings for the visual arts in Mexico City, ones that might otherwise be a bit off the radar for visitors: Laboratorio Arte Alameda (a former convent), Ex-Teresa Arte Actual (a former church), the Museo Universitario del Chopo (a nineteenth-century factory machine room), and the Anahuacalli, where the curatorial program regularly invites contemporary artists to create installations that interact with the permanent displays of pre-Columbian artifacts. While “¿Cómo se escribe muerte al sur?” [How does one write death in the south?], its current exhibition, is not primarily devoted to time-based media, it fits quite effortlessly with the rest of the TONO program, which this year explored death, cycles of life, and rebirth.
“¿Cómo se escribe muerte al sur?” is a two-person show featuring works by Paloma Contreras Lomas (until recently resident at the International Studio & Curatorial Program in New York) and Carolina Fusilier (a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship recipient), which mines the Anahuacalli’s history as Diego Rivera’s intended resting place for himself and his wife, Frida Kahlo, who predeceased him. Contreras Lomas and Fusilier installed works throughout the building to invoke the spirits of the dead with offerings (like altars) and antennae, sometimes to humorous effect. Fusilier in particular uses tubing in some of her works to make it appear as if her gossamer-like paintings — framed in aluminum-covered Styrofoam and mounted with rods and wires — draw energy from some of the pre-Columbian objects in the collection. Such appeals to cyclical life forces are also on display in “Paradise,” the show at Laboratorio Arte Alameda by Brazilian video artist Luiz Roque, whose video installations range from the wonderfully bizarre to the quietly poignant.
Long-term curatorial programs like the TONO Festival become sustainable when they serve a purpose or meet a pressing need within a community or locale. In this sense, Ozer still has some work to do to consolidate the platform in Mexico City. While the attendant crowd is diverse, it does skew toward a well-heeled and urbane international crowd. Several visual arts institutions in Mexico City find themselves in this same conundrum, and have made efforts to counteract a perception of aloofness among locals by not assuming that audiences will always speak English. The Museo Universitario del Chopo, one of TONO’s venues, is one such museum; for the past several months, staff has consistently hired an interpreter when public programs include participants who do not speak Spanish, a policy that I personally applaud. At TONO, though, this led to a series of curious interactions during the Q&A session following one of the video screenings. Sam Ozer and filmmaker Valentin Noujaïm spoke in English, and waited patiently for the interpretation into Spanish, only to realize that all of the audience questions were also articulated in English. As I left, multiple members of the audience quibbled among themselves about whether the interpreter had used the correct words or tense in her translation into Spanish. It appeared, then, that the English interpretation service had not quite reached its desired audience among TONO attendees, none of whom required it. There is still a way to go before TONO appeals to a non-English speaking art public in Mexico City — a formidable challenge if the goal is for the festival to last.
