Miguel Novelo: INFRAMUNDO

In his first institutional solo exhibition, Miguel Novelo presents an interdisciplinary project that brings together Indigenous knowledge systems, ecological grief, and technological innovation. In INFRAMUNDO, visitors move through immersive, responsive environments where perception, inherited ways of knowing, and emerging technologies converge. Virtual spaces become interactive with motion, sound and presence, inviting reflection on how humans, machines, and the living world exist as inseparable parts of the same systems. Born in the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico, Novelo draws on a landscape shaped by cenotes—natural sinkholes formed by the Chicxulub meteorite impact, presumably responsible for the extinction of dinosaurs, and regarded as sacred portals to the Maya underworld. By situating his work in this geologically and culturally layered terrain, he connects memory, ancestral knowledge, and deep planetary time. The exhibition is an invitation to the underworld, the INFRAMUNDO, where bodies are left behind and the human becomes geological. Contrary to the Anthropocene’s narrative of humans as a geological force, the exhibition invites the viewer to look inward—and become a rock. Guided by Maya cosmology and the avatars of the bat, jaguar, snake, dog, and crocodile, we enter a space for serious play and connection with the other. Immersive and generative installations invite us to defy fear of the dark and unknown, to embrace uncertainty. Augmented reality installations, machine learning apparatus, and rock sculptures invite us to create rituals, reconsider the inanimate as living, reflect on death, renewal, and coexistence with non-human intelligence. Through these responsive environments, INFRAMUNDO attunes visitors to intertwined cycles of life, death, and matter, offering a space to encounter worlds beyond human time and perception (and possibly beyond human patience).