ZONA MACO
1 - 9 FEBURARY 2025
In the visual landscape of Mexico City, the boundaries between functionality and formality often blur. This sprawling metropolis serves as a canvas for spontaneous creativity, revealing itself through stacks of chairs, patched walls, and repurposed objects that frequently go unnoticed.
The project seeks to challenge these narratives by placing these objects back into public spaces. The images are themselves fragments, moments snatched in media res, the way they might be experienced by a passerby. Ultimately, I see these daily actions as gifts.
It encourages a reconsideration of what constitutes art and exploration is further influenced by my overwhelming experience of Mexico City, where the interventions resonate with the city’s vastness and complexity.
Each encounter becomes a rehearsal of larger narratives, questioning the very essence of what we deem valuable in our surroundings. The images serve as fragmented moments, reminiscent of the fleeting experiences of a passerby, capturing the essence of urban life and its inherent complexities.
I spent months photographing and documenting these ephemeral moments, pitching the project to multiple sponsors, securing funding, and setting everything in motion. Then, as often happens, the support vanished just a week before execution. The project, once tangible and imminent, was suddenly suspended—caught in a limbo of dependence on collectors, brands, and sponsors. A system where an idea can be fully realized one day and completely unmade the next.
Then I remembered: in Mexico, there’s no such thing as a problem, only a solution. If the city itself thrives on adaptation, why shouldn’t this project? If it couldn’t materialize in the streets, then it would have to exist somewhere else.
So Bubble Gum Stuck on My Shoe is no longer a physical installation—it has mutated, re-emerged, and found its own alternative route. It will live in a digital space, a reflection of the very makeshift ingenuity it set out to document. The lesson wasn’t just in the images, but in the process itself: improvisation, reinvention, and the ability to keep going, even when the path is suddenly rewritten.
Because in the end, the city finds a way. So does the work.