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 programme at MUAC brings together three artistic practices that explore different relationships between sound, technology, physical experience and the construction of individual musical languages. Artur Rumiński is a Polish guitarist, composer and sound artist whose solo work moves beyond the conventions of guitar-based music towards experimental electronics, noise and highly material approaches to sound. Using distortion, repetition, field recordings and multilayered processing, he transforms the guitar into a source of dense sonic structures, ambiguous textures and intense physical energy. His music develops through accumulation, spatial complexity and the gradual transformation of sound, challenging conventional distinctions between instrumental performance and electronic composition. su dance110, the sonic identity of Berlin-based transdisciplinary artist Dan Su, develops a practice connecting modular electronics, voice, movement and embodied perception. Their performances construct hybrid sonic environments in which invented vocal languages interact with electronic textures, noise and rhythmic pulses. Drawing on choreography, self-built technological systems and processes of recursive listening, Su explores the relationships between bodily knowledge, uncertainty and the formation of unstable sonic identities. Their work approaches performance as an evolving encounter between human gesture and technological processes. Juanjosé Rivas is a Mexican transmedia artist whose practice moves between sound art, experimental music, improvisation, drawing and installation. His work investigates sound as a medium of observation, memory and transformation, bringing technological experimentation into dialogue with different forms of knowledge and cultural experience. Through electronic improvisation, field recordings and processes of translation and interference, Rivas constructs sonic environments that move between documentary material and speculative imagination. His recent project La Mecánica del Viento explores these relationships through an archive of scientific, technical and symbolic materials, creating listening situations suspended between recognition and estrangement. 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