Creative Practice

My work examines infrastructures that shape cultural life. Working across documentary, experimental video, installation, and sequential art, I create hybrid visual environments that translate cultural policy, governance systems, and participation into spatial and narrative forms. I approach institutions, information systems, and public processes as expressions of creativity and power. Research, data, testimony, and institutional language are reconfigured into moving images, modular displays, and sequential compositions that audiences can navigate and reinterpret. These works reveal how cultural power circulates while opening space for forms of participation and imagination.

My recent projects respond to the crisis of artists’ well-being by examining the structural conditions that shape the survival of cultural workers and arts organizations. Through documentary methods and participatory workshops, I build installations that operate simultaneously as artworks and civic prototypes—spaces where visitors assemble constellations of timelines, narratives, and evidence. The work proposes culture not as abstract policy, but as a living system produced and contested in everyday life.

Capital of Culture

A mixed media installation about the contradictions of cultural governance in NYC. It examines the broader political system that shapes how people engage with art, creativity, and culture. The show materializes the tensions between citizens and arts policy, confronting a city that proclaims itself the “Capital of Culture” while countless artists struggle to survive and arts organizations face prolonged financial strain. The exhibition frames arts policy as an apparatus that mediates power, turning cultural policy itself into a subject of artistic inquiry.

Currently in development at BRICLab Contemporary Art Residency

The Timelines Project

2017–ongoing
Mauricio Delfín

Mixed-media installation with handmade punch cards, wooden panels, and permanent markers.

The Timelines Project partners with communities to map key events that have shaped their cultural advocacy and activism. Through interactive workshops, participants collectively build timelines that document moments of organizing, policy engagement, and cultural action. These contributions are later digitized into an open dataset, making the civic information accessible for reuse.

Using this anonymous, sentiment-driven data, the project produces installations that interweave multiple timelines, revealing intersections between different lived histories. By foregrounding emotional and collective dimensions of data, the work challenges the idea of neutral cultural datasets and proposes more inclusive ways of understanding civic knowledge.

timelinesproject.com

VIVO

2008. Mauricio Delfín, Jaime E. Oliver, Mauricio Delfín, José Aburto

Interactive installation with recycled Styrofoam, speakers, projectors, and networked computers. Dimensions variable.

VIVO is an interactive installation that responds—partially unpredictably—to the presence of visitors. Sensors trigger evolving patterns of projected images and sound, generating continuous recombinations of audiovisual material.

The title references the video-card standard Video In–Video Out (VIVO), suggesting a mediated form of life defined by the circulation of signals. Constructed from light, sound, and recycled materials, the installation creates what the artists describe as a non-organic vital aura—a system that reacts to its surroundings in real time.

Noqanchis (all of us)

2006. Mauricio Delfin

Documentary video. 35 min.

Noqanchis (All of Us) documents life in a Quechua-speaking community in the highlands of Ayacucho, Peru, a region deeply affected by political violence during the 1980s and 1990s. The film follows families in the community of Chaca as they prepare for the Fiesta de las Cruces, a religious celebration that brings residents together.

Through informal conversations and everyday scenes, the documentary centers the voices of community members as they reflect on memory, suffering, hope, and resilience.

Viaje hacia la Noche (2004)

2005. Mauricio Delfin.

Documentary, 35 minutes

This experimental documentary celebrates the life and poetry of the Peruvian poet César Moro (1903–1956), a singular figure in Latin American surrealism. Filmed in Mexico, Peru, France, and the United Kingdom, the film traces Moro’s elusive presence across places that shaped his life and artistic imagination.

Through interviews with writers, artists, and scholars—including Mexican artist Juan Soriano and Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa—the film reconstructs fragments of Moro’s story. Testimonies, archival materials, and poetic interpretations evoke a figure remembered as brilliant, enigmatic, and deeply influential.

Moving between biography and poetic reflection, the documentary approaches Moro through absence as much as presence. Landscapes, memories, and voices assemble a portrait of an artist whose work continues to resonate across languages and generations.

Paradise on Earth

2004. Directed by Santi Zegarra.
Video by Mauricio Delfin.

A video installation on the Brazil-nut global economy and its impact on the people of Puerto Maldonado.

Audiovisual Essays

2003. Directed by Jaime E. Oliver.
Video by Mauricio Delfin.

Three audiovisual essays exploring how musical interpretation and instrumentation can be expanded by media.

2/2/2

2002. Directed by Mauricio Delfin. Music by Jaime Oliver.

A walk through New York during the protests against the World Economic Forum on February 2nd, 2022, exploring the sights and sounds of civic tension.

#MULTITUDES

2011. Group Exhibition, Co-Curator with Kiko Mayorga

The internet is often described as a network of networks—a vast system of protocols, standards, and infrastructures connecting millions of people and communities. Within this distributed environment, diverse cultures interact across overlapping public spheres, even as these spaces depend on privately owned technological infrastructures. Rich in metaphors of connection and community, the network contains multitudes: plural voices that inhabit and transform its creative, political, and economic possibilities.

Yet digital networks are not inherently decentralized or democratic. Protocols structure flows of information and can also enable new forms of control. At a moment when debates around net neutrality, access, and digital governance are intensifying, #MULTITUDES invites us to reconsider the internet as a contested cultural space.

Through artworks, projects, and documentation from Peru, the exhibition presents a fragmentary but interconnected view of the internet as a platform for civic participation, cultural inclusion, and the collective reimagining of public life.

PLASMA: Peruvian Symposium of Art and New Media

2008–2009. Directed and produced by Mauricio Delfín

Public program, symposium, and online platform

The Peruvian Symposium of Art and New Media was conceived as a platform for dialogue on research, theory, and artistic practice in emerging media in Peru. First held in 2008, the three-day symposium brought together artists, researchers, and cultural practitioners to discuss the cultural and technological transformations shaping contemporary media art.

The program included more than twenty presentations, regional facilitators from across the country, and travel grants supporting the participation of artists based outside Lima. All lectures were transmitted online and documented through a blog and publication, expanding access to discussions beyond the event itself. The symposium sought to strengthen networks among artists and researchers while fostering a national conversation on art, technology, and digital culture.

Festival de Video/Arte/Electrónica (VAE)

2004-2010. International Festival.

In 2004, Realidad Visual assumed the direction of the Festival Internacional de Video/Arte/Electrónica (VAE), originally conceived by Alta Tecnología Andina (ATA). Under this new leadership, the festival expanded beyond its founding organization to strengthen institutional frameworks for media art in Peru.

Between 2004 and 2010, Realidad Visual produced four editions of the festival across a national circuit that included Arequipa, Cusco, Lima, Trujillo, and Puerto Maldonado. This new phase focused on three priorities: decentralizing activities beyond Lima, promoting knowledge exchange among artists through workshops, and expanding the festival’s scope beyond video art to a broader field of media arts.

The festival presented the work of more than 100 national and international artists through exhibitions, conferences, workshops, concerts, forums, and publications.