Artist Statement

My practice moves between artistic work and social research, examining how culture is organized, governed, and experienced in everyday life. For over a decade, I have worked within and alongside cultural institutions, building civic platforms, advocating for policy reform, and studying how resources, authority, and representation are distributed. My artistic practice approaches many of these same questions through installation, drawing, documentary, and participatory work, creating situations in which people can encounter these structures, contribute their own experiences, and sometimes rearrange them.

The Timelines Project (2025–ongoing) brings this approach to cultural memory. Through workshops, communities collectively reconstruct histories of cultural advocacy, mapping the events that shaped their civic engagement onto handmade punch cards. These are digitized into open datasets and assembled into modular installations where multiple community histories intersect. The work asks how collective histories are constructed, whose experiences become part of them, and what gets lost.

Council (2026) approaches these questions through the spaces and relationships of civic life. Built from folding chairs, recorded testimonies, and opportunities for visitors to physically alter the installation, the work draws on the familiar language of community meetings, school auditoriums, union halls, and other places where people gather and make decisions together. Rather than representing a single authority or point of view, Council is assembled from many equivalent units and individual voices. Visitors can move through and rearrange the work, becoming participants in its changing structure.

Across these works, I am interested in culture as a way people remember, gather, negotiate power, and imagine how we might live together.

Council

In Council, fifty-one folding chairs, one for each New York City Council district, hold screens where New Yorkers reflect on moments when art or culture touched their lives in a meaningful way, and what the city should do so that everyone can have experiences like these. Together, their responses ask what it means to treat culture as a public good, and how people can participate in shaping it.

The folding chairs recall the familiar spaces of community meetings. They have no fixed arrangement and can be moved, gathered, and used. Visitors are invited to reorganize them, allowing the space itself to change through participation.

Chairs may also be used for gatherings or conversations within the gallery. Please return them to the installation afterward.

Council, 2026
Multichannel video installation
51 folding chairs, digital screens, video, sound
Variable dimensions

Capital of Culture

Mixed media installation. Currently in development.

New York City calls itself the capital of culture. Capital of Culture asks what that means for the thousands of artists who cannot afford to live there, and for the organizations that serve them and their local communities. This installation uses paintings and multimedia to materialize the gap between policy rhetoric and the structural conditions that shape artists’ daily survival.

Developed during a 2024–2025 residency at BRIClab Contemporary Art, Brooklyn, the project uses public data and civic testimony to examine how public investment in the arts is distributed, who benefits, and who is left behind.

Research for this project took place during a BRICLab Contemporary Art Residency Work in progress was presented at DUMBO Open Studios (April 2026).

The Timelines Project

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

Since 2017, The Timelines Project has worked with communities to collectively reconstruct histories of cultural organizing and civic advocacy. Through workshops, participants identify the events that shaped their engagement — victories, losses, turning points, moments of collective action — and mark them onto handmade punch cards. These are later digitized and published as open datasets, making the civic knowledge accessible for reuse.

The resulting installations interweave these multiple timelines, revealing intersections between different communities’ lived histories of cultural struggle. The work asks whose version of cultural history is preserved and whose disappears, and proposes a form of collective knowledge-making that resists the neutrality claimed by official datasets.

Workshops have been conducted with Shinnecock tribal members at Ma’s House (2025), the Latinx Arts Consortium of New York at The Clemente (2023), and New Yorkers for Culture and Arts on Governors Island (2023). An installation was exhibited at BRIC House Gallery, Brooklyn, March–April 2025.

The project’s concept grew out of my work in advocacy, data stewardship, and civic facilitation.

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, 2002, 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.