Notes on Fiesta de ánimas · Museo Amparo

First, the attribution, because it is routinely collapsed. Fiesta de ánimas (Salmos nocturnos) is an artwork by Paloma Contreras Lomas: a performative reading of roughly thirty-five minutes, structured in the format of a TED Talk, on death and violence in Mexico. The live electronic score is by Zutzut, built from the chapters she wrote. It is a collaboration with two distinct authorships, not a piece of music with a venue attached, and the distinction matters for anything one wants to conclude from it.

It has been staged twice. On 26 June 2024 at the Palacio de la Escuela de Medicina, UNAM, in the patio de columnas, commissioned by Museo Jumex with UNAM as part of Noche de Museos. Then on 15 November 2025 at Museo Amparo in Puebla, in collaboration with Temblores Publicaciones. The score from the first staging was released independently two weeks after it, as Música Para Fiesta De Ánimas (Salmos Nocturnos).

Museum programming that incorporates sound at this scale sits in a specific lineage. It reaches back to the sound experiments of the twentieth century and forward to what institutions like Ex Teresa Arte Actual have been formalizing since the 1990s. Museo Amparo’s decision to program the work within a contemporary art frame, rather than an ethnographic or musicological one, positions it differently than a folklore institution would. The title gestures at a vernacular Mexican relationship with the dead; the work itself is not a reenactment of it.

The choice of venue matters. Museo Amparo occupies adjoining colonial buildings in the historic center of Puebla and holds pre-Hispanic and viceregal collections across its floors. To stage a contemporary performative work with a live electronic score in that container is to place it in the same rooms as several centuries of cultural material. The piece does not comment on the collections. It occupies the same physical space as them.

What the restaging suggests about the future relationship between sound work and institutional programming is not settled. Two possibilities. The first is a temporary curatorial moment: interest peaks, some pieces get commissioned, attention shifts elsewhere. The second is a structural shift, with sound work becoming a recurring dimension of contemporary museum programming in Mexico, carrying dedicated budget lines and long-term relationships between institutions and producers.

The evidence available in mid-2026 tilts slightly toward the second. Four Mexican institutions programmed work with a commissioned electronic score inside the same three-year window: Palacio de la Escuela de Medicina, Ex Teresa Arte Actual, Museo Anahuacalli, and Museo Amparo. The commissions did not concentrate at a single institution; they emerged as a distributed pattern, and distributed patterns tend to be more durable than concentrated ones.

Two things weaken that reading, and both should be said. The commissions cluster around one curatorial relationship rather than five independent ones, which is a thinner base than the institution count suggests. And the public record is inconsistent: several of these exhibitions were reviewed without the sound credit appearing anywhere in the coverage. A pattern that is not written down is difficult to sustain and easy to lose.

The next twelve months will clarify which reading was correct.