The politics and poetics of aguas frescas
by Ambika Subra.
At markets, fondas, and sunlit plazas, glass vitroleras cluster together, their bellies filled with horchata, jamaica, tamarindo - each sweating under the weight of the day. Inside, a long-handled ladle stirs slowly, ready to be dipped and poured into waiting plastic cups. One ladle. Many hands. These aren’t just beverages - they’re rituals of circulation: sweet, spiced, and hydrating, but also quietly collective. To drink is to join a shared rhythm. Aguas frescas carry not only flavor, but memory, labor, and the social codes of everyday life.
At this year’s TONO Festival, artist and fashion designer Bárbara Sánchez-Kane transformed this gesture into a durational performance of time, sound, and community. Founded by curator Samantha Ozer, TONO is a nomadic festival of time-based media that connects international artists with Mexico’s contemporary art scene across unconventional venues. In its third edition, Aguas Frescas unfolded over two days in the courtyard of Museo Anahuacalli, proposing a new kind of “poetry fountain” - where bodies, liquids, and instruments formed a mutable, sonic ecology. Against Diego Rivera’s basalt temple of pre-Columbian artifacts, Sánchez-Kane offered horchata as both metaphor and medium.
‘Roma’ producer pushes craft, artistry amid Mexico’s creative boom
by Ambika Subra.
Mexico’s film industry has long been a wellspring of creativity, producing visionary filmmakers while remaining just outside the global spotlight. But some sense the center may be shifting. In February, Netflix announced a $1 billion commitment to Mexican productions over the next five years, raising the stakes and highlighting Mexico as a key figure in the future of global cinema. At Pimienta Films - the Oscar-winning production company behind Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma and Tatiana Huezo’s Noche de Fuego - that future isn’t simply about making more movies. It’s about making better ones, and building the artistic ecosystems that can carry Mexican cinema into its next era.
Few are better positioned to lead this shift than Nicolás Celis, Pimienta’s founder. Celis has helped define the shape of contemporary Mexican cinema. For him, the current moment is as urgent as it is expansive.
"Mexico is in a very vibrant position right now," Celis tells me. Production is at an all-time high, fueled by fiscal incentives and the influx of streamers setting up bases across Mexico City. "It’s the gateway between this new streaming economy and the rest of Latin America." Major studios are investing heavily - not just in infrastructure, but in securing a foothold in a market that’s growing rapidly in both content consumption and creative output.
“Horizontal vertigo” and the architecture of Pato
by Ambika Subra.
Juan Villoro now famously referred to Mexico City as a “horizontal vertigo” - a place that unfolds not upward but outward, a labyrinth of nonlinear, magical chaos. To live here is to get lost and found in equal measure. It’s a city where a last-minute lunch can shift your day, where you might follow a stranger into a new neighborhood and come out with a lifelong friend, or find yourself questioning everything because of a particular alleyway.
It was in this horizontal vertigo that I found myself having dinner with a close friend and renowned architect: Patricio “Pato” Galindo Chain.
To understand Pato's architecture is to understand how he inhabits his city. His work - spanning from the boutique Hotel Dama in Mexico City to the retreat Mi Cielo in Valle de Bravo - rarely announces itself with grandiosity. Instead, it collaborates with history, with time, with those who move through it. His motto: “Architecture is precisely the construction of a space by inhabiting it.”
