Between Remains and Rituals: Gestures of Community and Cultural Friendliness
The exhibition Hola / Xin Chào, the first exhibition of contemporary Mexican art to be presented in Vietnam, brings together the artistic practices of Rubén Gutiérrez and Aarón Eivet in a dialogue that crosses geographies, times, and sensibilities. Through a variety of materials—speculative photography, video, intimate drawing, graphics, installation, music, and performance—the exhibition opens a shared space where distinct languages converge around a common affection: the need to imagine communities from the margins and with fragments.
The pieces combine contemporary interpretations of even Mexico's pre-Hispanic cultures, evoking both the Olmecs—considered the "mother culture" of the continent—and the Toltecs, ancestors of the Mexica (Aztecs), reinterpreted here in graphic, pop, and digital terms. In this intersection, the ancestral and the contemporary converse to project new forms of identity and memory.
What truly unites these two artists is an ethic, beyond styles or media. Both approach art as a form of hospitality: the ability to open a space for encounter, shared memory, and collective play. Thus, the exhibition also functions as a gesture of cultural cordiality, a symbolic bridge between Mexico and Vietnam in the context of the 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations (1975–2025).
"Hola / Xin Chào" can be read as a laboratory of interculturality, where remains, rituals, and fictions become material for considering other ways of inhabiting the present.
Residues, shelters, fictions: practices of community imagination
Rubén Gutiérrez's work revolves around the construction of a nomadic mythology made up of precarious shelters, invisible adolescents, and reinterpreted material remains. Far from documenting a fixed world, his photographs, drawings, and videos aim to speculate about possible worlds. What appears in his images are clues, traces of absent narratives that invite us to imagine identity as something in flight.
In the photographic series Refugios y comunidades accidentales (Shelters and Accidental Communities) (2023–2025), Gutiérrez assembles visual vestiges of an imaginary civilization: a group of young people who inhabit the edges of territory and time. Their shelters, built with industrial waste, household residues, and hybrid cultural objects, are simultaneously a sign of emergency and an act of imagination.
Visually, these shelters evoke the wrestling masks, shattered piñatas, or improvised altars of Mexican popular culture. What could be read as a ruin becomes here an affective symbol of the future: the gathering reconfigured as a refuge; the mask transformed into a home. In this game of displacement, for Gutiérrez, the logic of the fragment ceases to be a lack and becomes a potential. The same impulse appears in Imaginary Friends (2020–2022), a series of miniature drawings that refer to the intimate gesture of childhood: inventing one's own worlds with clay, building small communities from the imagination. During the pandemic lockdown, this gesture reappears as an affective resistance to isolation. These miniatures function as a "poetics of intimate space," where intimacy becomes expansive and capable of sustaining a fictitious community.
A third interweaving is offered by the video that accompanies both series, where images of walls, vacant lots, or peripheral landscapes are digitally intervened. The effect of estrangement is reminiscent of speculative realism: the familiar shifts toward the fictitious, and at this intersection, a deeper truth about reality appears. Together, Gutiérrez's pieces constitute a poetic ecosystem where absence and projected nostalgia intertwine with the urgency of rebuilding bonds.
Allegories of the affective territory
Aarón Eivet's work deploys a different kind of archaeology: a pop archaeology of northern Mexico. His work is situated at the intersection of the festive and the political, the kitsch and the monumental, the local and the global. Far from irony, his aesthetic seeks to revalue popular forms as archives of memory and affection.
The monumental piñata Masked Hero, produced with students in Hanoi, condenses this hybrid logic: between the wrestling mask and Olmec heads, between the ceremonial and the festive. The piñata, usually destined to be broken, here stands as a totem: an ephemeral monument to play, community, and the popular.
In his graphic series, Eivet reinterprets the Atlanteans of Tula in neon and digital forms. These figures, normally anchored in the solemnity of stone, become mutating witnesses to a present permeated by visual remixes and the aesthetics of contemporary muralism.
Finally, in performances such as "You Decide What Contemporary Art Is," where he organizes a barbecue beneath a public sculpture, Eivet activates a redistribution of the sensible that fuses art and everyday life, monument and ritual, hospitality and action. Food, a basic gesture of community, is transformed into an embodied artistic practice.
With humor and affection, images of Charro Lounge and a tropicalized RoboCop complete this atlas of northern Mexico, where the border becomes a space of remixed symbols. His practice, far from nostalgia, proposes relatable monuments: aesthetics that renounce eternity and affirm shared belonging.
Conclusion: Hospitality and Cultural Exchange
In dialogue, the works of Gutiérrez and Eivet remind us that identity is a collective, mutable, and constantly recombining construction. In Hanoi, this idea is updated as a gesture of cultural hospitality: the exhibition seeks to open a space for mutual interrogation between Mexico and Vietnam, rather than a one-way representation.
Art, in this case, transcends the production of objects to present itself as an invitation: to imagine improbable communities, to recognize the power of the fragmentary, to celebrate the festival as a collective spirit. Between remains and rituals, between shelters and piñatas, what is at stake here is an ethic of encounter.
As Jacques Rancière points out, the politics of art lies not in its explicit message, but in its capacity to modify the very structures of our perception and experience. In Hola / Xin Chào, this redistribution is achieved through cordiality and shared imagination: a reminder that, even in times of fragmentation, it is possible to inhabit the world together.
- Rubén Gutierrez