Damian Romero

You’ve spent more than two decades building worlds through sound. What sensibility guides you when shaping an experience — whether it’s a MUTEK performance or the atmosphere of a dining room?

Sound and music are powerful driving forces in the design of experiences. They are not always the starting point for imagination and creation, but listening has increasingly become an essential component of any experience, whether in the design of monumental shows, restaurants, or other intimate gatherings. The fun part is drawing on diverse sources of inspiration for creation, such as architecture, nature, color, light, flavors, and smells. My eternal quest is inspiration, and I find it in many forms around me.

MUTEK MX has become a cultural landmark, merging art, technology, and community. What have these years of experimentation taught you about human perception — and what truly moves people today?

I believe that most people are disconnected from the possibility of changing their perceptions, thought patterns, or rationalizations, which is why it is so important to introduce them to creative exercises that make them feel and think from a different perspective. Often, people don’t know because they haven’t had or given themselves the opportunity to try something new, to imagine. The way we have been educated has led us to see imagination as something for children, with so many predetermined concepts that knowledge has become a double-edged sword. As we become adults, we lose the ability to imagine the impossible, unlike when we are children and imagine everything without limits. I’m not quite sure what motivates people now, but what I do know is that we are in a very serious period of disassociation, confusion, and apathy. What I think people are looking for, especially the younger generations, is to connect through honesty, through genuine contact, from that place where the only thing that matters in this hostile world is to be human beings with primary, real, and tangible values.

Food, music, and design are all forms of storytelling. How do you translate your artistic language into hospitality projects?

Precisely by telling stories, finding the thematic axes to build them, researching and exploring inspirations to build my own, working collectively, listening to other perspectives, drawing inspiration from the minds that surround me in projects, learning from historical practices to seek new paths with greater precision.

Festival-making is its own kind of hospitality — you’re welcoming thousands of people into a temporary universe. What parallels do you see between curating a lineup and curating a guest experience?

The final delivery of an experience based on its curatorial concept is sustained by a balance between every detail of the guests’ experience. From the entrances, the design of the routes and the flow of the space, the logistics of selling services, the quality of the products on offer, the gastronomic offering and, of course, the artistic audiovisual quality are all equally important. I believe that there is a limit to the scale of an experience. It becomes difficult to offer premium experiences at super-massive events, regardless of controlled areas. Generally, people have a good time, but they cannot hear or see well. Personally, I am in favor of premium experiences that are controlled in scale and in every detail, in order to create memorable and transcendental experiences.

Technology keeps reshaping the creative landscape: AI, immersive formats, new modes of performance. How is this influencing your vision for the future of MUTEK MX?

I believe we are at a turning point in our relationship with technology. When we started the project, we were pioneers in presenting the kind of experiences that involve the audiovisual aspect. Now, after 22 years, I no longer find the same inspiration in focusing solely on the benefits of technology, but rather a need to expose it from a critical perspective, with a leaning towards activism, towards awakening through art. The futuristic utopia that we imagined from a fictional space has caught up with us and is surpassing us as humanity. That is why it is so important that a platform like ours strives to provoke encounters to educate, debate, exhibit, and imagine futures in a responsible manner.

MUTEK has always championed experimentation. How do you keep a sense of risk and curiosity alive when the industry — and the world — is constantly shifting?

Sometimes it can be suffocating to create and produce in such a rapidly changing context as the one we are currently experiencing. It seems as if there is never enough time, as if we are living with a syndrome of lack of attention, passion, and apathy towards knowledge and sensitivity. The pandemic marked a turning point in how we experience the world today. The natural continuity of generational inheritance collapsed, which is why it is so complex to talk to the new generations, especially those who were educated during the pandemic. All of this creates a hostile, yet fascinating ecosystem, because this situation is also a source of inspiration to find new ways of doing things, new challenges, and new risks.

If you were a hotel, which one would you be?

Benesse House in Naoshima Island, Japan.

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