This year in Mexico City, the vivacious TONO Festival 2025 takes place from March 25 – April 6, and its visionary Founder and Artistic Director Samantha Ozer has left no stone unturned when it comes to sparking vital artistic and cultural conversation across the city’s most prestigious and trailblazing venues. Under the greater umbrella of TONO, a unique, not-for-profit arts organization focused on time-based artworks, TONO Festival is a mesmeric laboratory of creative endeavors, from live performances to immersive screenings to celebratory festivities.
Whitewall sat down with the inspirational and enterprising Ozer to speak about bringing together local and international artists, unforgettable moments in the festival’s past editions, and what visitors can look forward to in the comprehensive and joyful 2025 presentation.
Ligia Lewis at TONO Festival 2023; Courtesy of Samantha Ozer and TONO Festival.
WW: For those new to TONO and TONO Festival, how would you describe it?
SAMANTHA OZER: TONO is a US non-profit arts organization dedicated to exploring and supporting time-based artwork, including performance, dance, music, and moving-image. We directly commission artists and collaborate with institutional partners such as the Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Rockefeller Center, New York; the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; and the Serpentine Galleries, London.
TONO Festival serves as TONO’s laboratory—an annual event hosted across museums, music venues, and public spaces in Mexico City and Puebla, Mexico. During these two weeks, TONO takes over the city with video and sound installations, a live performance or screening every night, and music events and parties.
Music and sound are always a vital component of the projects and it’s been amazing to work with artists such as Mabe Fratti, Kebra, and the record label NAAFI. The festival is a very exciting moment, where we bring local and regional artists together with international artists, for whom it might be their first presentation in Mexico or Latin America.
TONO Festival Fully Engages Mexico City
Saodat Ismailova, “Two Horizons,” 2017; Courtesy of Samantha Ozer and TONO Festival.
WW: How does TONO Festival engage with its host city of Mexico City? And how will we see certain projects bring to life each unique venue?
SO: As TONO Festival is an organized programming effort across many sites, hopefully, it instigates audiences to explore new venues and imagine connections across these spaces. Mexico City has one of the highest concentrations of museums of any city in the world. From an architectural and historical perspective, there are many different stories within the design and often transformed use of these museums.
“Mexico City has one of the highest concentrations of museums of any city in the world,”
Samantha Ozer
Laboratorio Arte Alameda and Ex Teresa Arte Actual used to be churches, and artist Diego Rivera dreamed up the Museo Anahucalli to house his collection of pre hispanic art, with a design that references Mesoamerican structures.
During the last festival, we began working with the Museo Amparo in Puebla, which has one of the country’s largest collections of pre hispanic art, in addition to a contemporary collection. It’s always a fun process to work with Ramiro Martínez and his team to select a contemporary artist whose work can have an interesting dialogue in that context–last year, we presented Ali Cherri’s three-channel video installation Of Men and Gods and Mud (2022).
Must-See Highlights of Tono Festival 2025
Korakrit Arunanondchai, “Songs for Living,” 2021; Courtesy of Samantha Ozer and TONO Festival.
WW: Can you share some highlights of the 2025 edition of TONO Festival?
SO: While TONO Festival 2025 is scheduled from 25 March – 6 April and will contain the performance and screening programs, I’m excited that some installations will be open beyond these dates.
Starting in February, we are collaborating with Museo Anahucalli curator Karla Niño De Rivera on their annual exhibition which opens during the Zonamaco art week and will run past the TONO Festival. This is a two-person show by Carolina Fusilier and Paloma Contreras Lomas. During the TONO Festival, we will premiere a performance by Bárbara Sánchez-Kane, which is co-commissioned with MUDAM and will travel to Luxembourg in May. We are also commissioning a new performance with Jota Mombaça that will be presented at Casa del Lago, a new TONO venue. We will also present a new performance by Earteater and Freeka Tet and show video installations by Luiz Roque, Saodat Ismailova, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, amongst others.
Every year TONO collaborates with an international institution on the Wednesday screening program, and this year I am thrilled to be working with Sophie Cavoulacos, Associate Curator, Department of Film at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, on this. We are also partnering with the CAM Gulbenkian to program a series of videos from the festival at their museum in Lisbon.
Unforgettable Moments in TONO Festival’s Past Editions
Arthur Jafa at TONO Festival 2023; Courtesy of Samantha Ozer and TONO Festival.
WW: This is the third edition of the TONO festival. What have been some of the highlights of the festival and TONO the past two years?
SO: Over the past two years, we have presented the work of over fifty artists from twenty-two countries across thirteen venues–it’s been a lot of fun. As Joshua Serafin’s VOID performance imagines a futuristic god, their presentation at Cárcamo de Dolores in Chapultepec Park for TONO 2024 with the backdrop of a mosaic by Diego Rivera of the Aztec water god Tlalcoc was pretty spectacular.
“Over the past two years, we have presented the work of over fifty artists from twenty-two countries across thirteen venues,”
Samantha Ozer
Jao Moon’s Lifetime of Fire performance at Museo Anahucalli at dusk in this semi-open space with the sonic backdrop of a rainstorm in the garden and Arthur Jafa’s first presentation in Latin America with his video akingdoncomethas (2018), which brings together over 100-minutes of found footage of Black church services in the United States spanning several decades in the context of Laboratorio Arte Alameda as a former church were incredibly potent.
Lotte Andersen and Alonso Leon-Velarde’s deconstructed anthem Synthetic Opus (2023) vibrated off of the echo of Museo de Arte Moderno’s grand staircase entrance and TONO 2024’s co-commission with Serpentine Arts Technologies on the next chapter of Gabriel Massan’s Third World: The Bottom Dimension series brought TONO into a space of new technology.
I’m always thinking about Ligia Lewis’ closing performance for the inaugural TONO Festival and Diego Vega Solorza’s dance performance during the same edition, and Emilija Škarnulytė’s installation and performance in 2024. In November, I went to Venice for the premiere of La Culebra (2024), a live performance conceived by WangShui and Alberto Bustamante and co-produced by TONO and La Biennale di Venezia for the 60th International Art Exhibition Finissage. This project is incredibly dear to me as I began working with some of the artists during the first edition of the festival and it’s been a beautiful journey.
Saodat Ismailova, “Two Horizons,” 2017; Courtesy of Samantha Ozer and TONO Festival.
