Trastienda Machete Galería
Trastienda Machete Galería (Cuidad de Mexico)
Trastienda Machete is a contemporary art platform based in Mexico City, dedicated to supporting emerging and mid-career artists through a program that engages with both local and international contexts. Founded in 2014 and operating independently since 2022, the gallery foregrounds material research, craft-based practices, and critical approaches to territory, ecology, memory, and social structures. With women comprising approximately 80% of its roster, Trastienda Machete remains committed to amplifying historically underrepresented voices and generating sustained dialogue between artistic practices, cultural contexts, and global audiences.
Proposal
Dispositivos para contener un espíritu (Devices for Containing a Spirit, 2026)
Tania Reza’s Devices for Containing a Spirit explores techno-shamanism through an installation in which ritual and technology operate as interdependent systems. A central clay copal censer, enclosed in acrylic and activated by mechanical oscillation, mediates between the earthly and the intangible through smoke, scent, and movement. Surrounding wall-mounted mechanisms animate clay bells through repetitive gestures of rocking and vibration. Bringing steel, acrylic, clay, and copal into tension, the work considers whether a machine can contain a spirit without transforming it, forming a mechanical bestiary in which repetition becomes an act of devotion and contemplation.
Tania Reza is a Mexican visual artist born in 1991. She holds a degree in Contemporary Dance from the Universidad de las Artes and completed postgraduate studies in Art and Technological Mediation at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. She has also pursued graduate studies in Contemporary Art and interdisciplinary research and artistic practices.
Her practice encompasses installation, video art, live coding, and technological experimentation. Emerging from her background in dance, her work questions the ideals of beauty, precision, control, and technical perfection traditionally associated with academic movement. Rather than understanding dance as the mastery of the body, Reza approaches it as any movement that may or may not contain the body.
Through moving images, repetition, ritual, code, and hybrid media, she explores gestures that appear unstable, erratic, or incomplete. Technology becomes a means of expanding the perception of movement across space and time, while opening possibilities for forms of embodiment that fall outside established structures.
Reza received the National Young Art Award in 2019 and has twice been awarded the FONCA Jóvenes Creadores grant in New Technologies. Her work has been presented at Salón ACME, the Centro de Cultura Digital, ZAZ10TS Gallery in New York, La Nao in Mexico City, and the International Festival of Art and Technology 404.
