Tono

Tono is a new festival for performance, dance, music and video art in Mexico City.

With museum and gallery partners across the city, the exhibition will feature local, regional, and international artists. Long-term, Tono seeks to become an important space for dialogue surrounding time-based practices and for creating new threads of research.

Performance program

Tuesday, April 18

17:00: Osías Yanov, RepiT RepiT RepiT never RepiT el RepiT (2023) at the Museum of Modern Art

RepiT RepiT RepiT never RepiT the RepiT (2023) explores how to practice from the body conceptual and sensory fields of resistance against the stereotyped control of subjectivity. The performative and sculptural work is made based on sketches and essays from 2013. A decade later it is updated to manifest changes that our bodies have gone through in terms of notions of gender and violence. Through the work as a space for exercise, as well as in a night mist, it will seek to untrain our body format, to distrust our forms of presence. Performers: Quillen Mut, Ana g. Sambrano, the Man

Wednesday, April 19

14:00: Osías Yanov RepiT RepiT RepiT never RepiT el RepiT (2023) at Museum of Modern Art (capacity ~100 people)

18:00-21:00: Screening of the program part I at the Digital Culture Center in collaboration with MMCA, Seoul (the program will have a short intermission)

Watch and Chill 3.0: Streaming Suspense is a screening program in collaboration with the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Korea (MMCA), the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) and the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). The program will include physical presentations at all host partners and online presentations on the MMCA's Watch and Chill page (watchandchill.kr/en), the world's first subscription-based contemporary art streaming platform, where the public from all over the world can access the multimedia collection of the great international art institutions for free. Titled Streaming Suspense, Watch and Chill Season 3 explores the ways in which image and storytelling methods conjure immersion through strategies of tension. With subthemes such as "Landscape under Moonlight", "Assembly of Evidence", "Mutable Corpus", "Performance of the Undead", "Post-dystopian Worldbuilding", the contents for both the online platform and the offline exhibition present works that experience with the psyche of the bizarre, abnormality, shapeshifting, and related implications today. Artists include:

JANG Minseung, KWON Hayoun, Dean Cross, Alison Nguyen, Nic Hamilton, Jung Jaekyung, Paloma Contreras Lomas, Fang Lu, Lior Shamriz, Song Sanghee, Meriem Bennani, Asta Groeting, Fyerool Darma, Lior Shamriz, siren eun young jung, Naomi Rincon Gallardo, Club Ate (Justin Shoulder, Bhenji Ra and collaborators), Cecile B. Evans, Park Chankyong, Jacolby Satterwhite, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Garush Melkonyan, Luiz Roque, Chitra Ganesh and Jaekyung Jung.

Thursday, April 20

19:00: Jao Moon, The Lifetime of Fire (2022) at Museo Anahuacalli (recording prior to the Haus der Kulturen der Welt presentation)

The Life of Fire (2022) is a performance that Jao Moon created for the collective exhibition "This is not a burial, it is a resurrection", at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. His practice is based on his growing up experience in the marginalized periphery of Cartagena (Colombia). Living in an environment of constant resistance transformed him into a body politic and made him question the prevailing social order. In this work, candles are attached to a mask on the head, slowly moving around a room. As the candles melt, the wax leaves marks on your skin. In this ritual between pain and pleasure, he seeks to decolonize ancestral memory through fire.

Friday, April 21

21:00: Performances and party at Cafe Sismo, curated by Kebra. There will be performances and DJ sessions by Chicloso, La Maga, Mabe Fratii & Hector Tsta, Monkey Funky y Kebra B2B Bruja Prieta.

Tuesday, April 25

18:00-21:00 Screening program part II at Digital Culture Center in collaboration with MMCA, Seoul (the program will have a short intermission)

Wednesday, April 26

18:00-21:00: Screening program part III at the National Museum of Anthropology in collaboration with MMCA, Seoul (the program will have a short intermission)

Thursday, April 27

16:00: Lotte Andersen, Naima Karlsson, Alonso Leon-Velarde, and Max Manzano, Synthetic Opus, 2023 at the Museum of Modern Art

Synthetic Opus (2023) is a live adaptation of Chaos Has No Morality (2022), a three-channel audio installation by Lotte Andersen composed by Naima Karlsson and Alonso Leon-Velarde. The installation was a proposal for a deconstructed anthem, exploring the histories of national anthems and the hypnotic quality of a musical hook. For TONO, the artists collaborate with composer Max Manzano and jazz musicians from Mexico City to perform the composition.

19:00: Diego Vega Solorza, Dorje (2019) at Ex Teresa Arte Actual

Dorje is a contemporary dance piece that talks about ritual and the cyclical. The work is the result of "Generadores de Movimiento" a laboratory of the body directed by Vega Solorza, in which patterns and physical concepts of dance such as balance, weight, dislocation, suspension, vertigo and gravity are investigated. As a dance exercise, the purpose of the work is to make this series of tools acquired in the research carried out, an act of choreographic composition, resulting in the sum of dynamics and corporal exercises that place the performers in situations that lead them to to physical and mental states of alteration and complexity, allowing the piece to be elevated to an expressive act, understanding the construction of the body as a dialogue that is established from bodily and emotional communication.

Friday, April 28

Proyección del programa part III en Centro de Cultura Digital en colaboración con MMCA, Seoul (el programa tendrá una breve intermisión).

Saturday, April 29

21:00: NAAFI, ATLACOYA: Agua Triste del Lago de Texcoco (2023) - address provided with rsvp (more information here)

ATLACOYA: Agua Triste del Lago de Texcoco is a live performance and contemporary opera conceived by the Mexican record label NAAFI that traces the story of the Tlaloc Monolith and explores broader notions of spirituality, water, sexuality, and history. It will be performed by La Bruja de Texcoco, with original music by Lao, a script by Pepx Romero, a stage by WangShui and production and artistic direction by Mexican Jihad. It is a representation that reflects the state of the contemporary queer creative scene in Mexico City. After the opera, the night will transform into a NAAFI party.

Sunday, April 30

18:00: Ligia Lewis, Deader Than Dead (2020) at General Prim (more information about the live performance here and the video performance here)

Originally developed for Made in L.A. 2020, the multi-faceted work began with an intrigue-based investigation of the deadpan, an impassive mannerism deployed in comedic form in order to illustrate emotional distance. Lewis abandoned this recursive set of death due to COVID-19 and now the dancers use Macbeth's climactic soliloquy ("Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow," a reflection on repetition and nonsense) as the opening of a work that will unfolds in modular parts, each of which is an illustration or parody of death, stillness and emptiness, each of which is tied to its own carefully selected soundtrack or sample. The play is full of play, but it is also a meditation on "play," or acting, as well as the recurring cycles of tragedy and familiarity within the black and brown experience; over time, in the form of a loop; about acting; about touch, as an act of both care and violence. The work is constructed in the form of a musical lament, a prolonged looping complaint played ad infinitum, breaking down along the way.

Video installations

(From April 18 to 30, during the opening hours of each venue)

Cecilia Bengolea, Shelly Belly Inna Real life, 2020 at Casa Margarita

Meriem Bennani, Party on the Caps, 2018-19 at Casa Margarita

Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Verses of Crap, 2021 at the Anahuacalli Museum

Santiago Gómez, Global Warming, 2020 at Casa Margarita

Agata Ingarden, 4ROOMS, 2023 at Center for Digital Culture

Arthur Jafa, akingdoncomethas, 2018 at Laboratorio Arte Alameda

Paloma Contreras Lomas, The Mexican Beyond, 2020 at Casa Margarita

Garush Melkonyan, Cosmovision, 2023 at Casa Margarita

Diane Severin Ngueyn, If Revolution Is A Sickness, 2021 at Casa Margarita

Luiz Roque, XXI, 2021 at Casa Margarita

Jacolby Satterwhite, We Are In Hell When We Hurt Each Other, 2020 at Casa Margarita

— Tono

Image: Courtesy of the Artist. Ligia Lewis, Deader than Dead (2022) at Cordova Gallery