Organized by Juan Canela, Artistic Director, ZsONA MACO and Kit Hammonds, Chief Curator, Museo Jumex, Aires acondicionados [A/Cs] is a project conceived by artist duo Rometti Costales (Julia Rometti, France, 1975, and Victor Costales, Belarus, 1974) that takes the relationship between the materials, some internal dynamics of the museum, and the natural events in the surrounding area as its starting of point. Each object or intervention relates to specific events that occur at varying durations from the reflections of sunlight on its windows to the long-term effects of the environment on the gallery’s marble floor.

Works in the gallery are presented in waiting to be activated in actions that frequently occur outside of the museum’s hours where no public is present. Through this, the artists render overlooked details visible or displace the focus of attention towards different frames of reference and timescales. Rometti Costales have invited other artists, academics, and philosophers to create an event, performance, or on-going project, including Lorena Ancona, Minia Biabiany, Jorge Satorre and Fernando Ortega.

The artist Lorena Ancona presented on May 2 Registro sonoro para idiófonos [Sound recording for idiophones], an improvised performance that explores sound and materiality. Among the most ancient instruments in many cultures, idiophones use their own body to produce vibrations. The work also sits in relationship to Ancona’s installation Rain Breath shown in gallery 3, and connects the physical properties of air, its vibrations as sound and as a medium for carrying smoke or scent, to cultural events such as the dance of the gods or the arrival of the rain.

Rometti Costales and Sergio Freidberg, philosopher, physicist and architect, talked about the shapes of Time, while on a tour of the museum’s underground and its vital organs.