Andar es ver by Claudia Luna & Benjamín Torres at Project Room
Claudia Luna (Mexico City, 1988) and Benjamín Torres (Mexico City, 1969) have developed artistic practices that find in walking and everyday observation fundamental tools of inquiry. Their journeys through Mexico City transform the experience of urban transit into an exercise in the critical reading of space. Luna and Torres shift the emphasis of their processes toward an ongoing interpretation of the city as a territory of experience, conflict, and the formation of subjectivity.
Thus, the figure of the wanderer is central: heir to both the flâneuse of the Franco-Peruvian writer Flora Tristan (1838–1840), the Mexican transeúnte of Francisco Zarco (1850–1852), and the flâneur of Baudelaire (1863) and Walter Benjamin (1929), as well as to contemporary revisions that include Guy Debord’s psychogeography (1955), Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1980), and the multifaceted collage that constitutes The Revolution of the Flâneuses (2019), in which Anna María Iglesia brings together pioneers such as Virginia Woolf and George Sand.
The recurrent itinerancy between the central, northwestern, and western areas of Mexico City—including the neighborhoods of Atlampa, Tlatelolco, Guerrero, Centro Histórico, Santa María la Ribera, San Rafael, Tabacalera, San Miguel Chapultepec, Escandón, and Tacubaya, among others—allows the practices of Claudia Luna and Benjamín Torres to be situated within a specific geography where history, social inequality, processes of urban transformation, formal and informal economies, visual and material memory, and the body itself appear and remain visible, inscribed within public space.
The figure of the wanderer emerges here as an agent of critical observation who, while traversing the city, identifies the narratives embedded in its streets, objects, and crowds. Through this practice of attention, the metropolis becomes an active interlocutor: a space capable of generating wonder, conflict, and belonging. Its complexity is so stimulating that the very act of moving through it acquires an aesthetic dimension, a creative impulse to read its signs and transformations.
Through the discovery of seemingly insignificant objects, infrastructures, and symbolic fragments, Claudia Luna identifies forms and systems of spatial organization that she later translates into sculpture, drawing, and ceramics. Through operations of translation, abstraction, and shifts in scale, bollards, barriers, signage, and construction remnants acquire new visibility, revealing how the city shapes behavior, directs movement, and conditions the sensory experience of those who inhabit it. In her work, the ordinary frameworks and geometries observed in her surroundings become material indexes of the relationships between body, space, and power.
Benjamín Torres, for his part, has developed a practice centered on the collection, circulation, and reorganization of images and objects drawn from contemporary visual culture. His process can likewise be understood through the experience of urban wandering, conceiving the city as an expanded archive where layers of visual, anthropological, and historical information accumulate. Along routes connecting the Historic Center to Tacubaya, or Escandón to Santa María la Ribera, the presence of commercial signage, discarded printed matter, graffiti, industrial materials, and abandoned objects forms a landscape of signs that the artist recovers and rearticulates. Through strategies of appropriation, assemblage, and accumulation, Torres examines the ways in which material culture produces forms of collective memory.
Viewed together, the practices of Claudia Luna and Benjamín Torres find in the street a laboratory for observation and thought. In both, walking functions simultaneously as a method of research, an aesthetic device, and a political position. The figure of the wanderer becomes the protagonist of narratives constructed through discovery, collection, and the interpretation of the everyday. Rather than representing the city, their works decode it as a living structure of historical, social, and material relationships, revealing that what often remains at the margins of attention—the fragment, the found object, the discarded remnant, the trace—also constitutes a form of knowledge about our existence in the present moment.
— Christian Barragán
