Interactive Art Festival, Mexico City Feb 1 - 8, 2026
Performance art
50 artists at work
Interactive installation
A new form of Interactive Art Festival
Work In Progress is an interactive art festival dedicated to the act of creation from Feb 1 - 8, 2026 in Mexico City. We are peeling back the curtain on the artistic process. This is a living document where you don't just look at art—you watch it breathe. Come immerse yourself in the workflow of artists as they craft, struggle, and build. No filters, no polish—just the raw, honest energy of work in progress.
WHAT YOUNEED TOKNOW
What: New interactive & immersive art festival – join the creative process like never before! When: Feb 1-8, 2026 Where: Nicaragua 23 Bis How: Arrive curious, comfortable, and ready to explore. Wander freely through immersive installations, scheduled moments & interactive experiences.
Buy TicketYour Map to the Mess
Raw state
Dive into the heart of Work In Progress with our curated event schedule. From the opening night at Nicaragua 23 Bis to guided microdose sessions at Croma, each event is a portal into the creative chaos of Mexico City's art community.
Nicaragua 23 bis
Feb 1st
2026
An exclusive preview for press and VIPs featuring a work-in-progress tour of the entire building.
Nicaragua 23 bis
Feb 1st
2026
Gota fría is a time-based work in which a melting ice popsicle becomes the work itself. Cold and humidity briefly interrupt the senses, allowing a different bodily experience.
the "process" gallery
On view, unfinished
Our video grid captures the essence of the Process Gallery, where art comes alive through motion and time. Relive the festival's energy as you watch installations evolve, performances ignite, and artists push boundaries in this unique interactive experience.
Meet the Makers
Studio live
Discover the visionaries behind Work In Progress. Our roster of artists, curators, and collaborators brings diverse backgrounds and innovative practices to Mexico City, from bioart explorations to sculptural experiments and urban interventions.
01
Zahra Saleki
Visual Artist, Fine-Art Photographer
Zahra Saleki
In 8 Minutes, Zahra Saleki presents a live, process based activation in which participants move through an intimate cycle of speaking, movement, and photographic transformation. Each session begins with an eight minute spoken sharing about a personal struggle or moment of change, followed by improvised movement captured through long exposure photography. Through this process, Saleki translates internal emotional states into visual form, creating a growing archive that reveals how the work unfolds and accumulates over time.
02
Victor Alvarado (El Chico Paletas)
Visual Artist, Teacher, Researcher
Victor Alvarado (El Chico Paletas)
El Chico Paletas presents Golosinas Visuales, a participatory project featuring optical games made with encapsulated, high-gloss candy that distort perception and invite viewers to experience a “Candy Reality.” Through a performative installation, visitors are encouraged to intervene, break, and even taste the candy pieces, engaging in a collective act that explores the sweet and bittersweet realities of everyday life through play, reflection, and sensory disruption.
03
Pía Watson Dávalos
Artist
Pía Watson Dávalos
Pía Watson Dávalos presents Telepática Universal and Cluster Cloud, two interconnected works in progress that explore subtle perception, collective intuition, and shifts between immersion and distance. Through participatory action, silent exchange, and spatial experience, the projects test whether intention, coincidence, and sensory awareness can generate shared patterns. By inviting visitors to transmit, receive, move, and reflect, the work examines how perception is shaped by proximity, attention, and the environments we inhabit together.
04
Deborah L. Morris
Visual Artist, Textile Artist
Deborah L. Morris
Deborah L. Morris is a visual artist whose textile-based practice centers on touch, material presence, and participation. For this work in progress, she constructs an evolving knotted structure using dyed cotton rope and locally sourced materials, allowing the piece to grow through weaving, labor, and collective contribution. Through haptic engagement and collaborative making, the work explores connection, exchange, and the physical intertwining of cultures, materials, and bodies. Material in Tension, Threads across Borders My practice centers on textiles and mixed media, with a strong emphasis on haptic experience. I am interested in how touch, texture and material prescience shape the way viewers engage with artwork. Rather than positioning the work as purely visual, I aim to create pieces that invite interaction, encouraging viewers to explore surface, color, and structure through their hands as well as their eyes. For this work-in-progress, I plan to begin by constructing a large structural form based on cargo netting. Using knotted dyed cotton rope, I will build a grid-like framework that can function either as a freestanding sculptural piece or, if time allows, expand into a room-like environment that viewers can enter. Knotting and weaving will serve both as a structural method and a conceptual language, referencing labor, connection, and accumulation over time. Additional knotted and woven elements will be interwoven into the initial structure, allowing the work to grow organically throughout the process. While I will bring dyed cotton rope from the United States to establish the foundational structure, I plan to source additional materials locally in Mexico. By combining U.S.-based materials with those found or purchased in Mexico, the work will physically embody a “weaving” of cultures, materials, and contexts. This blending of sources is central to the conceptual framework of the project, emphasizing exchange, hybridity, and interconnectedness. Participation is a key component of this project. Visitors may be invited to take part in the knotting and weaving process, contributing directly to the evolving form. WORKSHOPS/ACTIVATIONS We Are the Loom: A Participatory Weaving Workshop I will host a workshop or activation in which participants themselves become the loom. Through coordinated movement and shared engagement, participants will interact with one another to collectively create a cloth. This performative and collaborative weaving emphasizes the social nature of textile production, highlighting the body as both tool and structure while fostering connection among participants. Soft Structures: Textile traditions and Sculptural Making A secondary workshop can be created focusing on reuse and other textile techniques besides weaving. I plan to work with found materials gathered in Mexico City, such as cardboard, fabric scraps, and plastic remnants. These materials will be combined through stitching, tying, and layering to create smaller sculptural works or additions to the knotted structure. This aspect of the project can also function as an open workshop for all ages, using accessible materials like cardboard, paint, yarn, and thread. Participants can explore basic textile techniques while engaging creatively with reuse, texture, and form. Overall, this project explores touch, participation, and material exchange through textile-based structures and collaborative making. It is intended to remain flexible and responsive to its environment, growing through interaction with place, materials, and people. Deborah L. Morris is a visual artist whose practice spans a wide range of mediums. She earned her BFA in Light Metals from the Rhode Island School of Design but has since expanded her work to encompass textiles/fiber, photography, printmaking, ceramics, sculpture, and installation. She is the past president of the Textile Study Group of New York and works with the MFA textile program at Parsons School of Design in New York in their Atelier program. Her work has been exhibited across the United States and Asia. Notably, her textile pieces are part of the collection at the Chojun Textile and Quilt Art Museum in Seoul, South Korea. She has also been an invited artist at the Korea Fiber Art Biennale in Suwon, South Korea and the Korean Fiber Art Forum in Seoul, South Korea. Deborah has participated in residency programs, including Art, Artists and You at the Children's Museum of Manhattan, Mana Exchange at Mana Miami in Florida, and the Space + Time Artist Residency at Guttenberg Arts in Guttenberg, NJ.
05
Valentina Guerrero Marin
Artist, Mixed Media Artist
Valentina Guerrero Marin
Valentina Guerrero Marín proposes two open studio visits that share her working process with glass, inviting the public to engage with her material research, tools, and methods. Based in Mexico City and born in Chile, her practice explores environmental crisis, climate colonialism, and speculative futures through glasswork and other media, using material as a carrier of historical and collective narratives.
