Sanatorium Merkurial MX is a special festival project taking place in Mexico City, developed in collaboration between the Polish festival Sanatorium of Sound and the artistic collective Merkurial. The programme brings together artists connected to both projects, whose practices emerge from different cultural, musical and geographical contexts. These highly individual artistic practices find common ground in the way they develop their own musical languages and address artistic challenges beyond the dominant narratives of the Western European avant-garde. Mexico City is not simply a location for this edition. The project grew out of Robert Piotrowicz’s long-standing involvement with Mexico’s experimental music scene, developed over many years through concert visits, performances, projects and collaborations with artists, festivals, organisations and cultural institutions. Sanatorium Merkurial MX is conceived as a continuation of these longstanding connections and as another step in the ongoing relationship between artistic and curatorial practices associated with the project and the contemporary music scene in Mexico City. One of the central territories explored by Sanatorium Merkurial is the broad and often ambiguous space between contemporary abstract music and traditional music. Here, tradition does not function as something to be reconstructed, preserved or simply reinterpreted. Its traces — rhythms, forms, modes of organising sound, cultural memory and individual genealogies — become material for entirely new creative gestures. The programme therefore creates a field of exchange between abstract contemporary practices and radically contemporary forms that carry echoes of different musical traditions without attempting to reproduce them. This speculative bringing together of otherwise different artistic positions is complemented by a broader recognition of the changing condition of contemporary performance. Sanatorium Merkurial places particular emphasis on the affective dimension of abstract music — on its capacity to operate through the body, intensity, tension and the relationship between performer and audience. Through affect, music can move beyond the autonomy of its formal structures and acquire a different presence within social and political space. Sanatorium Merkurial MX focuses precisely on this expanded field: a space in which musical abstraction becomes at once a physical, cultural and social experience. THE PROGRAMME The two-day programme at Casa del Lago brings together distinct artistic practices. A special edition of MoE with Paal Nilssen-Love brings Guro Skumsnes Moe and Håvard Skaset together with Paal Nilssen-Love, confronting the physicality of amplified strings with one of the most forceful approaches to percussion in contemporary improvised music. Jacek Sienkiewicz, founder of Recognition Records and one of the key figures of Polish electronic music, develops a musical language situated between minimal techno, abstract electronics and contemporary composition. Rabih Beaini, Lebanese electronic musician and founder of Morphine Records, represents a distinctive approach to electronic music shaped by rhythmic complexity, analogue synthesis, improvisation and a sustained engagement with musical practices extending beyond Western electronic traditions. Robert Piotrowicz’s work is characterised by vast sonic structures, electronic complexity, extreme dynamic range and physical intensity. His comprehensive approach to composition integrates advanced electronic processes into a characteristic and highly individual musical language. Mariam Rezaei, an Anglo-Iranian composer and turntablist, radically extends the vocabulary of the turntable, manipulating vinyl and digital sound in real time across experimental composition, improvisation, noise, mutant club music and hip-hop. Rashad Becker, a German-Syrian composer and electronic musician, constructs synthetic environments whose sounds behave like autonomous organisms, evoking imaginary musical cultures rather than referring directly to existing traditions — an approach developed through works including his Traditional Music of Notional Species series. Xenon x PLK brings together rapper and poet Xenon and DJ and sound artist PLK (Agata Polak). Their collaboration combines psychedelic rap, experimental electronics, noise and club music, exploring unconventional rhythms, vocal experimentation and heavily processed electronic sound. This project is co-financed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland from the Culture Promotion Fund. Supported by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute