I looked out the train window. No clouds. I saw nothing. My glasses were slightly fogged by the FFP2 mask, which covered my cheek rather than my nose and mouth. I thought it had been a dream, but it was too brief for that — more like a fleeting image. A narrative too subtle for a dream.

I considered instead that it might have been one of those images that appear when you close your eyes firmly, seeing abstract blotches of form and colour. These images are called phosphenes and are generated internally via pure electrical stimulation: no light, just spontaneous, emergent images. Impossible to record or share.

As a child, I used to close my eyes to watch the shapes that seemed trapped between the retina and the brain. I loved losing myself in the infinite fractals that emerged like abstract landscapes in constant motion. I remember them as a journey through complex networks — a passage through tunnels of light — and although they were mostly unrecognisable smears and forms, those passages had a forward momentum, a zoom-in logic, as though responding to some temporal order: an irreversible progression unfolding ahead. There was no way to know what shape would come next, but I knew there was no going back to the ones that had passed. Always zooming in, phosphenes seemed to move forward — like time, toward the future.

I suspect that if we ever experienced phosphenes in reverse, moving backwards instead of forward, we would notice immediately. Just as we would notice if a log in a bonfire, instead of burning and producing smoke, had its smoke flow back into the fire to extinguish the wood. Or if waves, instead of breaking forward, retreated from the shore, and the undertow moved ahead instead of pulling back. Or if rivers climbed toward the mountains and formed glaciers, instead of moving always downward, toward the sea, in the direction of time’s arrow. Or if objects, instead of falling, rose.

Or if we could reverse ageing — growing younger with time. We would notice that too.

As a child, I found that pressing my eyes would further animate the images. In children, the visual cortex is highly active and plastic, which is probably why the phenomena are so rich and fractal-like at that age. That vitality, too, is subject to time’s arrow. As an adult, I see fewer phosphenes. They are still there — and I find them as fascinating as before. But I find myself wondering why I stopped seeking them out, why I stopped creating those inner landscapes and noticing the passing of time.

Like an arrow, the train moved forward. I looked through the window. There were still no clouds, nor a red sun in the sky. But I could see yellow fields covered in rapeseed flowers — so typical of spring in Brandenburg. Things moved rapidly, disappearing behind me. I thought about the urgency of noticing time as it manifests in the things of this world. About experiencing the subtle progression of phosphenes, the train moving forward, the rapeseed flowering only for a couple of weeks, next to the rye swaying like a pendulum in the wind — a true champion of time.

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Belonging, which has been the ongoing fuel of Panik, is also the spirit that drives Curiosity Labs Berlin and Mexico City. It is about creating artworks, researching, doing interesting projects and collecting, but the value lies in collaborations and dialogue rather than in acquiring goods for status or exclusive levels of membership, or to support projects for brand presence and other marketing strategies.

Collecting, sponsoring and gallery representation, I hope, are reshaping into more thought-provoking and collective practices. In this sense, modern patron schemes have a lot to learn from the traditional mecenas of the past.

This also responds to the weakening or the disappearance of artist representation in the traditional sense. More and more artists are in direct contact with institutions and particulars. Galleries are suffering too. And this saddens me. The renewal should come from new ways of connecting, owning and belonging.

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Artists, we complain a lot. It comes with the trade. And this year, during Art Week in Mexico, as well as last year and the year before, and so on, I heard my colleague artists, curators and gallerists talk about struggles, difficulties, and a lack of opportunities and sales. —How are you? — I’m doing really well! That is how we answer in Mexico, no matter what. — But it was a terrible year. We repeat in between the eternal parade of hugs and kisses. The phrase is part small talk, but it is also true.

This time it feels different. I can recognise the anxiety in other people’s faces. That is surely how I look. The world changed under our feet. The rules, certainties and uncertainties of the past are no longer the same. Galleries and fairs are closing, grants are super competitive, there are budget cuts, less international mobility for artists, and diminished institutional budgets. This is not new to anyone, and while I advocate for resilience, things have changed.

I have read in various outlets that new generations prioritise lived experiences over ownership. I agree with this observation. Swimming with whales in Baja California, a meditation retreat in the forest, or an exclusive gala and dinner might be preferable experiences to buying an artwork to hang on the wall, or storing it, as many collectors do.

This shift prioritises not only experiences, but also access. Being a member of a group has always been a human desire. But our attention seems to be centring even more on an economy of access rather than one of ownership, emphasising services over objects, gated information, and exclusive experiences. We don’t own our music or movies anymore; we pay to stream them. The same goes for books in PDF or Kindle format, as well as other items such as documents, travel guides, and maps. I am conflicted about NFTs, not because they are digital, but because they do not tell stories to anyone but the collector. They are never seen. They go from the artist’s drawer to a new one, protected by a password.

We don’t own our pictures; we post them. We cherish VIP access to banks, airlines (silver, gold, metal, platinum), and mobile apps for anything and everything, from health to streaming to self-improvement, writing, A.I., and so on. Since COVID, our communication is also gated via video-conference interfaces. Sure, buying and owning things is still a sign of status, but having bitcoin and renting an expensive apartment, which is also part of an access economy, are too. If you lose the access key to your crypto-wallet, forget about the money. Today, our passwords define us.

This is quite dangerous. Access is easily lost or revoked. Your Kindle collection — your precious books — does not belong to you. Books have been destroyed many times in history. That is not necessary anymore. It is enough to lock you out. The symbolic and political acts now rest on access too, not only objects. Since the Arab Spring, in every civil uprising, internet access has been cut off to curb social unrest. Access is power.

I am not being purposely nostalgic here; I am a part of the analogue world as well as the digital transformation. This is not the change I am interested in noticing. Rather, I want to see and participate in transforming the relations between collectors, artists and institutions. And move to an economy of belonging rather than an economy of ownership and commodified access.

Owning an artwork is about storytelling. We all know that many collectors like to buy at the artist’s studio. Sure, they might get a better price, but it is also about the experience, the story and the processes. Artworks mean much more than just the object.

Perhaps the future of collecting lies not in possession, nor in gated access, but in sustained dialogue.

The game, a kind of Mexican human balero, consists of wearing a belt with an empty cup attached to the front, instead of a belt button, and a small ball that hangs from a thread between the participant’s legs. The objective is to move the hips so that the ball swings and falls inside the cup. Most participants moved their bodies back and forth like a strange pendulum, which was amusing and somehow sexual. Others broke the toy or tried alternative, football-inspired gestures. While the game should not be much of a challenge for Colombians or Panamanians, in Germany, some did better than others. But the point was not to master it, but to laugh, fail, and embrace the unattainable.

I did not participate in the game. I was already “out there”, showing my artworks. As an artist, no matter how many times you exhibit your work, or the importance or magnitude of the exhibition, you are always playing an uncomfortable game. You are on the spot, half naked, split between yourself and your artwork, turned inside out, troubled by expectations, playing cup and ball, being the human balero.

—That is the spirit! You repeat to yourself, but the mantra falls short. And coming to terms with trouble is something we learn as artists, but it hurts every time we exhibit. Art has been a place for me to think freely and be rebellious. It has been a place of unconformity. Because of art, I am still a teenager. And that spirit should not be hidden away. It is also one of the reasons we respect artists, visit exhibitions, museums, or collect art.

Art is also about resilience. Understanding this is both our blessing and the cross we carry. We learn to continue regardless of the circumstances: if nervous, confused, happy or depressed, we continue. If someone cuts the funding, we find the money, rent the van, carry the work, hang it, promote it, do the exhibition and even sell the work. This bliss, of course, is also a trap, as we cannot imagine any alternative to being artists. Artists only know about art-making.

Maybe to his discontent from the grave, I will appropriate David Alfaro Siqueiro’s famous words “There’s no other route than ours”, a phrase that marked his dogmatic artistic and political position towards social struggle, and re-signify it to: “There is no other route than this one”.

This text is not about renouncing. When not romantic, I celebrate resilience. It entails movement. In contrast, and driven by fear, stillness is a dangerous illusion that has populated our ways of living and politics across the globe.

I’ll come back to the subject of resilience after the gallery week in Mexico has ended. For now, a lot of energy is needed, not only to survive the week physically but to endure the current crisis affecting artists, galleries, and institutions.

After coming back from Mexico City in New Year’s Eve 2025, I checked into a hotel for a night before starting the renovations. That night marked the beginning of a great future ahead. It also gave me back the cyclical temporality associated with the new year that I had already lost. For various reasons, including the pandemic, the passing of years had been erased into a big chunk of time.

That recovered spirit of renewal incites me today to write this text accounting for this passing year and welcoming the following. This year, however, I won’t start anew. Rather, and borrowing this from the German expression “guten Rutsch ins neue Jahr”, I’ll slide into the next one with hope to give order to the multiple and prolific “lines of flight” brought with this year of vivid images, suggestive dreams, and fertile possibilities. After structures break, new reconnections, vectors and creative efforts are needed to find new and unexpected forms of living. This is at the core of Deleuze’s and Gutarri’s thinking. In this sense, life, thinking, and art practices are mechanisms of “fuga” or escape.

It is a problem of thermodynamics too. After intense times of expansion, fluidity, and agitation, things tend to reorder, stabilise, slow, or fall down, forming vortexes or creating sediments.

That night, at the hotel in Mitte, I realised that just across the street stood a hostel where I had stayed during my very first visit to Berlin, 27 years ago, in 1998, when I first fell in love with the city. It was after a visit to Tacheles and a walking tour of Berlin. Such a cliché! But Tacheles, and I mean of course the old 90’s Tacheles, once home to creative squatters and artists, was an important inspiration for me to become an artist, and eventually to move to Berlin. Sadly, the iconic building is now a façade concealing super-commodified living, commercial and cultural spaces, that although interesting, they lack the experimental spirit and sense of freedom of Berlin in the 90’s. My visits to Berlin in those years were brief, but fundamental to my career.

I managed to build the bathroom walls and install a sink and a toilet in my studio, in the first two weeks of January. It was very precarious, but I felt confident that I could secure a semi-comfortable space before travelling back to Mexico: “wishful thinking”, would say my mother. I was perhaps delusional, or at best, blinded by that sense of heroism that comes from pushing yourself to extreme situations and challenges. I missed the feeling of climbing mountains in Mexico. This was similar. It was exciting and strenuous. But also absurd, which is a familiar feeling within art processes.

I did not manage to insulate a working studio/bedroom before flying back to the intense heat of the Mexican rainforest and continuing with the research and production of Estelas del Usumacinta exhibition at the Museo Amparo. I couldn’t build the door or insulate the windows and walls for the bedroom. Effort alone was not enough.

My therapist helped me to put things into perspective: “—You did not sit at the negotiating table with General Winter, also known as Russian Winter or General Frost”. He was referring to the harsh conditions that helped the Russian armies to win against both Napoleon and, later, the Germans during World War II. Winters win wars. He was right. I thought about winter, but I overestimated it. The cold in Berlin is hard. It is not because of the temperatures but because of its damp and grey spirit. It’s long-lasting and consistently monotonous.

I couldn’t heat a single room. I lost the battle. I spent hours thinking about heat and cold, planning to design and build insulated modules inside the studio—like establishing a base camp in outer space. Insulation is about producing spaces that are deliberately disconnected from their surroundings, minimising air exchange. A heated space must be separated, as much as possible, from the outside world, much like the closed systems imagined or engineered in thermodynamics under conditions that rarely, if ever, exist in nature.

Being well-informed and considering heat is a thermal activity in itself, but without action, it does little to regulate temperature. Thermodynamics are relentless. Heat disperses. Entropy increases. Always. Cold things cannot produce heat. These principles, implied in the elusive second law of thermodynamics, are well embodied in almost every physical, human, and planetary entity, including time itself.

The battle to regulate heat is perhaps the most vital in the Universe. Every calorie we ingest adds to the effort to resist our own heat loss and death. Unlike my studio, which needs insulation, we sustain thermal equilibrium by exchanging energy with the environment. We are marvellous machines. But in thermodynamics, the scale is important too, and heat is embodied in various layers and temporalities, from the microscopic to the cosmic, including human bodies and the walls of my studio, to weather patterns and climate change. At the atmospheric level, heat regulation and homeostasis, what Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock called Gaia, is probably the biggest challenge of our times. Climate change is the thermal event of greatest importance.

I try to stay positive. I propose thermal thinking as a more careful, collective and bodily form of thinking, where energy is partially conserved through dialogue and exchange with the environment. But energy has a strong tendency to disperse. Things that have form (at least what we understand as form) tend to lose it. Patterns disappear, and heat is lost. They say that the Universe will eventually reach its heat death, a state of maximum entropy governed by random processes. I don’t know if that is the case. But at least tonight, we celebrate with fireworks, dispersing —wasting perhaps— heat into the atmosphere.

At least, spring is closer.

The event, hosted mostly around the kitchen, was led by the warmth of Glühwein and a big pot of soup. We talked, drank, ate, and danced. It was a great celebration. We had many things planned, some of which got postponed to future occasions. As many times, it is a form of collective spontaneity that drives things forward.

For me, the ritual marked the incredible effort put into building a place that I can finally share with you, and where we can do projects together. It was also the opportunity to thank my friends and family for doing this with me. I started last winter with no water, heating, or electricity. Today, we are open. And while it is still precarious in some aspects, it does not lack a warmth of spirit. I feel proud and thankful.

However, some questions got lost in the celebration. What is Curiosity Labs Berlin? What are the plans? How can you collaborate?

If this was not clear, it is not for lack of intention. But because Curiosity Labs Berlin is a nascent project to be shaped and developed with your kind effort, input and thinking. I have many ideas, mostly about experimentation, curiosity, and creativity. Especially, within the context of what I perceive as a flattening, a sense of fugacity, and lack of depth manifested in social media, art practices and artificial intelligence. Disoriented, we are challenged in every discipline and practice.

“Think we must”, said Hannah Arendt. And while the context of her words responded to the rise of fascism and totalitarian states in the past (also relevant today), my invitation seeks to encourage forms of thinking that are critical but also thermal.

Inspired by the work of philosopher Michel Serres and Joseph Beuys, I propose Thermal Thinking as a form of thinking with concepts, but also with our nerves, skin and body. Knowledge burns before it explains. It is felt in the body too. Thermal thinking and Thermal Events will be the umbrella concepts to follow in 2026. We invite you to be part of this. Get in touch, subscribe, visit, and suggest your projects.

Life is combustion. We glow!

I dreamt the entire planet was flooding. Water surged forward, reclaiming space. I saw rivers overflowing and torrential rains. Water spilled through rooftops and hallways. The sea moved inland, submerging houses, schools, cities, farmland, and mountains—until everything was covered.

I understand this dream in two ways. On one hand, a global vision: the total flood as a premonition of planetary collapse and climate change. A chronicle of a death foretold, unfolding in fast motion and in real time. A vision of despair.

On the other hand, the dream felt deeply personal—like a flood within me. It began as a journey through my own body, saturating it before spilling outward again. I felt the flood expand through my veins, skin, stomach, and head. I felt full, radiant. I woke up anxious about the future of the planet, but also intoxicated with emotion.

This exhibition is the result of that dream. It speaks of floods, of hydric rhythms and solar energy. It also addresses the contradictions of Mexico City—a metropolis built atop a vast lake that no longer exists, yet still holds memory. The lake, like us, chilangos, remembers through the body.

The exhibition is also a personal reflection. My father often consulted the I Ching—his compass in times of important decisions. After his passing, I inherited the book and its practice. It now guides me.

I cast the coins a few months ago and received Hexagram Kuai—Breakthrough—which signifies a rupture followed by resolution. It evokes the image of a lake rising into the sky, a torrential downpour, a river overflowing and releasing its pressure. The text suggests new beginnings—a rupture, then clarity. A flood.

This exhibition proposes the flood as both image and metaphor. Not only as catastrophe, but as a transformative force—one that cleanses, mingles, reconciles, and compels us to reimagine the world. The lake rises into the sky, the rain falls, we are inundated—and the sky shines again.

The works in the exhibition reference great floods or suggest subtle flows of water—layering, colliding, diverted, or stalled. Kuai is the name of a new series of paintings premiered in this show. These works explore hydrodynamic forces translated into geometric forms that either communicate or obstruct one another.

The Emergence photo series reflects on light as an emergent phenomenon—appearing only under specific and unrepeatable conditions, like a flash of lightning or a rainbow.

The exhibition includes additional works that speak to floods, deluge, and climate change. At the same time, they point inward—to personal intensities, to inner overflows that might be crisis, transformation, or emotional fullnes.

Neuzelle. Emilio Chapela

To exemplify this, he describes a particular photo of a boy wearing a uniform. He explains that it is not the image as a whole what moved him, but the particular way in which the young man’s belt was buckled, that enacted a specific childhood memory, felt as a puncture.

These kinds of experiences are profoundly personal and cannot be repeated, reproduced or even shared. Not only when motivated by the same gestures or details within the image. This eludes the author too, who has no control over how—or when—a viewer will form an emotional connection. This does not mean, however, that aesthetic qualities are purely serendipitous. The punctum is elusive, but it’s not a random operation.

The studium, however, points to the qualities of the image that can be described easily and shared with others: the context of the image, the subject-matter, the forms, and colours. What is happening in a photo? How things look like? It refers to the aspects of a photograph that are culturally legible and widely understood—its subject, historical context, composition, and narrative elements.

These are the qualities that draw our interest and that can be shared and discussed, leading to aesthetic experiences too. In the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, for example, what brings wonder to the viewer is the careful and subtle construction of a precise narrative that he described as the Decisive Moment.

While these are qualities that are easily shared and can be better described as those derived from the punctum, they are not entirely eloquent in the same way, for example, as language. Photography, on occasions, hides a lot more than what it tells: its narratives, when present, are brief, atmospheric, concentrated, or subtle.

The photographs in this exhibition respond to these ideas. Rather than building linear narratives, they allow moments—details, gestures, or textures—to resonate unexpectedly with the viewer, inviting a personal and intimate response.

This images also point to specific locations in Mexico, UK, Germany, but the images are open and suggestive. They aim to puncture, but also to construct meaning by reflecting on the poetics derived from physical phenomena, science, personal experience, and wonder.

I’m writing this letter in the hope of motivating a conversation that moves beyond our fast-paced and brief exchanges on social media and the internet. This is the first of a series of future updates that I plan to share here with you. I would be happy if you choose to stick around by subscribing.

In coming posts, I’ll be sharing the ideas and motivation that inspire this account. For now, and for those of you that don't know me, I’m a visual artist from Mexico City living and working in Berlin. I’m interested in the connections between science and art as seen through an ecological perspective. As I believe that it is still possible to animate imaginaries and poetics for better futures.

I want to share the exciting news that I’m in the process of moving to a wonderful new studio in the Wedding district of Berlin. This inaugurates the start of an important chapter of my life in the wake of personal changes. The time for the peacock. A moment denoted by strong and evocative images and vivid imagination.

My father was passionate about the I-Ching. He looked for advice in it when facing significant changes. I do too now.

I threw the coins: I got hexagram Kuai (breakthrough), which is one of irruption followed by a resolution. It is the image of a river flooding its banks, resolving its pressure, moving, and suggesting new endeavours —a breakthrough, as the name proposes. It asks for novel ways of thinking, moved by curiosity and affective sensibility.

Flooding, in this case, also means occupying the new space. To mark this transition, I am inaugurating Curiosity Lab Berlin, my own artist studio dedicated to artistic experimentation. It is a place to build networks motivated by conversations within an extended community to stay creative and resilient in today’s world spoiled by flatness and poor imagination brought by the commodification and standardization of life at large.

As it is now, the studio lacks many basic things. There is nothing inside but an empty space with lots of difficulties but great potential. Occupying the studio is the very first step. It seems self-referencial, but an art studio becomes a studio only after being occupied by the artist. This was true in the work of Bruce Nauman. He thought of the studio as a laboratory of a space of experimentation and interaction of materials, architecture, ideas, and objects, including his own body.

I draw inspiration from Nauman, but Curiosity Lab Berlin is also a space for dialogue, exchange, and collaboration. It brings together artists, authors, researchers, and environmentalists seeking to expand our artistic and ecological poetics and imagination.

January 2025

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