Linked to La Pasión según la gente (2000–2001), my first project in Germany was Mextoys. This work represented a decisive breakthrough in my practice. It was my first fully realized multimedia piece, and my first work to integrate video and music, music-theatre, improvisation, and humor into a single conceptual and structural framework.

Mextoys was also the first piece in which I consciously focused on the idea of humans as machines: as imitative beings whose behaviors become automated. In the piece, popular Mexican street toys were used as symbolic and material elements, referring to early forms of automated or robotic learning produced through mass elementary education systems. The title Mextoys deliberately echoes sex toys, alluding to the mechanization of intimacy and desire, and to the ways in which human bodies and behaviors can become programmed, standardized, and instrumentalized.

Mextoys: Video Interlude 1 Adult content		Mextoys: Video Interlude 2 Adult content

The orientation toward animism is closely linked to a well-documented cognitive instability between the external world and one’s own psyche. Rather than being a primitive belief system overcome by rationality, animism can be understood as a persistent mode of perception grounded in how humans experience and structure reality.

Thinkers such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung described how unconscious projection animates external objects, causing them to appear as extensions of inner psychic processes. Jung’s notion of participation mystique—derived from Lucien Lévy-Bruhl—articulates a pre-reflective condition in which subject and object are not yet clearly separated. From a phenomenological perspective, Maurice Merleau-Ponty emphasized perception as an embodied entanglement between self and world, while contemporary cognitive theories such as Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s concept of embodied cognition, along with Andy Clark’s extended mind hypothesis, further challenge rigid boundaries between mind, body, and environment.

Mextoys: a toy in-between

Within this conceptual framework, Mextoys operates as both a compositional strategy and a critical reflection on perception, agency, and automation. Objects, toys, performers, and audiovisual media are not treated as inert materials, but as entities endowed with a form of agency through projection, interaction, and repetition. The work thus explores the unstable boundary between the human and the artificial, revealing how mechanization is not imposed solely from the outside, but emerges from deeply rooted cognitive and cultural structures.