Flash Art uses cookies strictly necessary for the proper functioning of the website, for its legitimate interest to enhance your online experience and to enable or facilitate communication by electronic means.
Enter TONO, a new festival of video and performance art, which mounted its ambitious inaugural edition from April 18 to Organized and curated by Samantha Ozer, it featured four video exhibitions and nine performances in nine separate venues across the city.
Music and its attendant subcultures were a focus of most videos on display, and nearly all the performances had prominent soundtracks. This was apt in a city ringing at all hours with the sounds of mariachis and street vendors, a place where rhythm has been fundamental to creative expression since the Aztecs lay the first stones atop Lake Texcoco. Clad in only a beige thong and a red leather mask with lit candles affixed to its crown, Moon twisted and turned as hot wax dripped onto his body, its sound viscerally amplified by a set of concealed microphones.
This comparison felt all the more fraught on the former site of sham trials for the Spanish inquisition. Videos were paired on a loop in four wood-paneled rooms β an unfortunate move for the average impatient gallerygoer, though the pairings teased out a range of connections. An ashen zombie, he followed her around the immersive set, installed in a dilapidated warehouse, as both actors told the story of the birth of Mexico City, which the Aztecs built on the islets of Lake Texcoco before the Spanish tore it down and had the lake drained.
The witty libretto drew links between colonialism, sexual repression, and environmental catastrophe, and reached its climax in a scene featuring a torture device of hissing vacuum tubes designed by New York-based artist WangShui. This was only the fourth act of the full opera, which deserves a full viewing on an international stage.
