Between 2013 and 2016, the MUDAS series unfolded across Mexico City, Oaxaca, and the Pacific coast as a dispersed experiment in ephemeral materiality and sensorial rupture. Rather than fixed artworks, these installations operated as oxidative gestures, each composed of a single fresh leaf—banana, tamal, maize—pinned to a wall and left to decay in situ. The process was slow, olfactory, and public: within 48 to 72 hours, green gave way to ochre, moisture seeped into the surface, and an intense, humid aroma filled the air. Viewers didn’t just look—they inhaled, waited, documented, posed. Some touched. Others watched it curl. Each piece functioned as a sensorial threshold, a small act of resistance against accelerated visual culture and the dominance of inert surfaces. Installed in hotel showrooms, domestic studios, beach shelters, rural talleres and textile platós, MUDAS mapped a material and social cartography of Mexico through smell, rot, and relational proximity. Each site altered the pace of oxidation: in La Roma, the anthropomorphic silhouettes felt bohemian and breathy; in Mazunte, humidity collapsed the leaf in hours; in Oaxaca, mountain air thickened the dry-down into brittle paper. The project wasn’t about decay as metaphor—but as operative method: the leaf’s transformation was the work. No preservatives. No post-production. Just the leaf’s agency meeting urban conditions. In this way, MUDAS proposed a curatorial mode rooted in material surrender, where humidity, heat, air, and humans collaborated in producing fragile, temporary infrastructures.
Socially, the project staged minor rituals of presence. Some viewers passed through by chance—crossing a lobby, a kitchen, a beach. Others arrived in search of the smell. Photos circulated. The leaf, no longer just organic matter, became a device for encounter: tactile, temporal, decentered. In its repetition across 40+ pieces, MUDAS refused spectacle and embraced soft seriality, building a dispersed archive of urban gestures that blurred art, ritual, and installation. The city was not backdrop—it was co-producer, its microclimates and materials shaping each oxidation differently. The project continues to resonate in 2026, not as a nostalgic cycle but as a methodology for working with decay—as a form of political and sensory attention. In a moment of planetary extraction and material exhaustion, MUDAS insists on the aesthetic of the impermanent, where the smell of something dying is not tragic, but grounding. A reminder that time leaves marks. That slowness matters. That we are participants in every transformation.
Año Números de MUDA Ubicación Descripción
2013 001–016 Showroom Virreyes, Centro, México DF Instalaciones iniciales en showroom hotelero; oxidación aromática sobre pared blanca, inicio del protocolo sensorial.
2013 017–018 Showroom Durango, La Roma, México DF Extensión hacia zona bohemia; formas efímeras con carga antropomórfica.
2013 019–021 Showroom Hamburgo, La Juárez, México DF Culminación en Zona Rosa; interacción social con photocall y capas de lectura afectiva.
2015 022 Estudio Valverde, La Escandón, México DF Transición a estudios privados; exploración de la decadencia material como textura curatorial.
2015 023 Estudio Jesús León, Guatemala, México DF Instalación en espacio artístico alternativo; incorporación de hojas de tamal como gesto local.
2015 024–027 Taller Independiente - Blue, Oaxaca Serie realizada en taller rural; oxidaciones lentas en entorno natural.
2015 028 Mazunte / Playa del Pacífico, Itinerante Instalación efímera en playa; obra sensorial de corta duración, vinculada a humedad y arena.
2016 030–034 (5X) Estudio Narvarte Universidad y Colección Privada, Ciudad de México Nuevas mudas ligadas al Mercado de la Merced; secado controlado de dos semanas.
