SANATORIUM MERKURIAL - Mexico City

SANATORIUM MERKURIAL MX

19–22 November 2026
Mexico City

19 November — Fonoteca Nacional

Tomasz Krakowiak
Katarzyna Karpowicz & Marek Pospieszalski
Rogelio Sosa

20 November — Casa del Lago UNAM

MoE with Paal Nilssen-Love
Jacek Sienkiewicz
Rabih Beaini

21 November — Casa del Lago UNAM

Robert Piotrowicz
Mariam Rezaei
Rashad Becker
Xenon x PLK

22 November — MUAC — Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo

Artur Rumiński
su dance110
Juanjosé Rivas

Sanatorium Merkurial MX is a special festival project taking place in Mexico City, developed in collaboration between the Polish festival Sanatorium of Sound and the artistic collective Merkurial. The programme brings together artists connected to both projects, whose practices emerge from different cultural, musical and geographical contexts. These highly individual artistic practices find common ground in the way they develop their own musical languages and address artistic challenges beyond the dominant narratives of the Western European avant-garde.

Mexico City is not simply a location for this edition. The project grew out of Robert Piotrowicz’s long-standing involvement with Mexico’s experimental music scene, developed over many years through concert visits, performances, projects and collaborations with artists, festivals, organisations and cultural institutions. Sanatorium Merkurial MX is conceived as a continuation of these longstanding connections and as another step in the ongoing relationship between artistic and curatorial practices associated with the project and the contemporary music scene in Mexico City.

One of the central territories explored by Sanatorium Merkurial is the broad and often ambiguous space between contemporary abstract music and traditional music. Here, tradition does not function as something to be reconstructed, preserved or simply reinterpreted. Its traces — rhythms, forms, modes of organising sound, cultural memory and individual genealogies — become material for entirely new creative gestures. The programme therefore creates a field of exchange between abstract contemporary practices and radically contemporary forms that carry echoes of different musical traditions without attempting to reproduce them.

This speculative bringing together of otherwise different artistic positions is complemented by a broader recognition of the changing condition of contemporary performance. Sanatorium Merkurial places particular emphasis on the affective dimension of abstract music — on its capacity to operate through the body, intensity, tension and the relationship between performer and audience. Through affect, music can move beyond the autonomy of its formal structures and acquire a different presence within social and political space. Sanatorium Merkurial MX focuses precisely on this expanded field: a space in which musical abstraction becomes at once a physical, cultural and social experience.

THE PROGRAMME

19 November — Fonoteca Nacional

The programme at Fonoteca Nacional has been developed specifically for the institution’s format and brings together three performances.

Tomasz Krakowiak works with percussion, objects and acoustic phenomena, focusing on the physical properties of sound, vibration and resonance, and their relationship with space. His practice extends beyond conventional percussion techniques, using amplified instruments and everyday objects as resonating systems whose acoustic properties become the material of musi§cal construction.

Katarzyna Karpowicz and Marek Pospieszalski continue a collaboration initiated at Sanatorium of Sound in 2025. Their music brings Karpowicz’s distinctive approach to traditional Japanese instruments and electronics into dialogue with Pospieszalski’s language of composition and improvisation, transforming different instrumental traditions into a contemporary musical form shaped by timbre, tension and a highly physical approach to sound.

Rogelio Sosa is a Mexican composer and sound artist whose practice moves between composition, improvisation, performance and sound installation. His recent electronic work is built around self-developed feedback systems that generate complex, continuously transforming sonic structures, while drawing on ritual and ceremonial practices from different cultures to construct syncretic and imaginary musical worlds.

20–21 November — Casa del Lago UNAM

The two-day programme at Casa del Lago brings together distinct artistic practices extending across experimental electronics, contemporary composition, improvisation, noise and alternative approaches to musical tradition.

A special edition of MoE with Paal Nilssen-Love brings Guro Skumsnes Moe and Håvard Skaset together with Paal Nilssen-Love, confronting the physicality of amplified strings with one of the most forceful approaches to percussion in contemporary improvised music. Their performance combines the raw energy of experimental rock and noise with open structures of improvisation, in which rhythm, density and the relationships between performers remain in continuous transformation.

Jacek Sienkiewicz, founder of Recognition Records and one of the key figures of Polish electronic music, develops a musical language situated between minimal techno, abstract electronics and contemporary composition. Rhythm and repetition function as tools for exploring structure, time and perception, while the physical immediacy of electronic dance music coexists with increasingly open and abstract compositional forms.

Rabih Beaini, Lebanese electronic musician and founder of Morphine Records, represents a distinctive approach to electronic music shaped by rhythmic complexity, analogue synthesis, improvisation and a sustained engagement with musical practices extending beyond Western electronic traditions. His work moves between the energy of club music and experimental composition, developing complex structures through the direct manipulation of electronic instruments.

Robert Piotrowicz’s work is characterised by vast sonic structures, electronic complexity, extreme dynamic range and physical intensity. His comprehensive approach to composition integrates advanced electronic processes, microtonality and alternative tuning systems into a characteristic and highly individual musical language. His recent compositions extend synthetic sound towards imaginary instrumental forms and fictional musical traditions, without abandoning their entirely electronic origins.

Mariam Rezaei, an Anglo-Iranian composer and turntablist, radically extends the vocabulary of the turntable, manipulating vinyl and digital sound in real time across experimental composition, improvisation, noise, mutant club music and hip-hop. Drawing on scratching, beat juggling and techniques of her own invention, she transforms recorded material through physical gesture, fragmentation and the continuous reorganisation of sound.

Rashad Becker, a German-Syrian composer and electronic musician, constructs synthetic environments whose sounds behave like autonomous organisms, evoking imaginary musical cultures rather than referring directly to existing traditions — an approach developed through works including his Traditional Music of Notional Species series. His compositions establish complex relationships between synthetic sound, spatial perception and forms of musical organisation that resist established instrumental and cultural conventions.

Xenon x PLK brings together rapper, poet and interdisciplinary artist Xenon and DJ, sound designer and intermedia artist PLK (Agata Polak). Their collaboration combines psychedelic rap, experimental electronics, noise and club music, moving between spoken word, screams, freestyle, unconventional rhythms and heavily transformed electronic sound. Xenon’s approach to vocal performance and poetic experimentation intersects with PLK’s practice rooted in rave culture, sound synthesis and industrial textures, creating a hybrid form that challenges conventional distinctions between rap, electronic production and experimental performance.

22 November — MUAC

The programme at MUAC brings together three artistic practices that explore different relationships between sound, technology, physical experience and the construction of individual musical languages.

Artur Rumiński is a Polish guitarist, composer and sound artist whose solo work moves beyond the conventions of guitar-based music towards experimental electronics, noise and highly material approaches to sound. Using distortion, repetition, field recordings and multilayered processing, he transforms the guitar into a source of dense sonic structures, ambiguous textures and intense physical energy. His music develops through accumulation, spatial complexity and the gradual transformation of sound, challenging conventional distinctions between instrumental performance and electronic composition.

su dance110, the sonic identity of Berlin-based transdisciplinary artist Dan Su, develops a practice connecting modular electronics, voice, movement and embodied perception. Their performances construct hybrid sonic environments in which invented vocal languages interact with electronic textures, noise and rhythmic pulses. Drawing on choreography, self-built technological systems and processes of recursive listening, Su explores the relationships between bodily knowledge, uncertainty and the formation of unstable sonic identities. Their work approaches performance as an evolving encounter between human gesture and technological processes.

Juanjosé Rivas is a Mexican transmedia artist whose practice moves between sound art, experimental music, improvisation, drawing and installation. His work investigates sound as a medium of observation, memory and transformation, bringing technological experimentation into dialogue with different forms of knowledge and cultural experience. Through electronic improvisation, field recordings and processes of translation and interference, Rivas constructs sonic environments that move between documentary material and speculative imagination. His recent project La Mecánica del Viento explores these relationships through an archive of scientific, technical and symbolic materials, creating listening situations suspended between recognition and estrangement.