Marta Minujín with her first mattress in her studio on Rue Delambre, Paris, 1963
interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist
photography by Ada Navarro Aguilera
In 1963, Marta Minujín invited Christo, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Jean Tinguely to an empty lot in Paris to set her artwork ablaze. This incendiary happening—a term coined by Allan Kaprow in 1959—marked a radical turning point in the Argentinian artist’s career. Today, with her first solo exhibition in Mexico City at Kurimanzutto, Minujín stands out as an artist able to see, hear, feel, and even taste the future: a future both soft and hard, sweet and self-possessed. Her most recognizable works include fluorescent mattress sculptures twisted into amorphous, seemingly impossible forms—love letters to intimacy, sex, and mortality. The first were made from discarded mattresses found outside hospitals. Even more political are her toppled monuments of phallocentric power, some covered in loaves of sweet bread, turning collapse into satire and protest. These horizontalized spires became pillars of anti-authoritarianism, critiques of capitalism, and monuments to soft power. Her technological happenings anticipated the future of mass communication. Utilizing satellites, phone lines, and closed-circuit television, Minujín forged connections that foreshadowed today’s world of constant contact. Spanning more than six decades, Minujín’s oeuvre is rooted in her belief that people should live in art, not just look at it.
“We wanted to destroy art—museums, galleries, everything.”
Marta Minujín inside Minuphone, 1967
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: This is your first exhibitionin Mexico, and it brings together recent works, but it's also the first timethat the El obelisco acostado (The obelisk lying down)—ahistoric piece—will be shown in Mexico. Can you tell us about this?
MARTA MINUJÍN: I made this piece in 1978 for the First Latin American Biennial in São Paulo. I got the idea to laydown all monuments—to change the idea that the world is vertical. The world is actually multidirectional. I don't like thinking that it's all straight. So, I invented the Statue Of Liberty lying down, the Eiffel Tower lying down. All monuments around the world, lying down. The first one I made was a full scale replica of Buenos Aires’s Obelisco, which is seventy-four meters long, but lying down. It was immersive—the people could walk in, there were televisions and Super 8 film projections. Since then, I have made many, many monuments lying down—including the James Joyce tower in Dublin lying down, covered in loaves of bread.
OBRIST: They somehow challenge the authoritarian narrative of publicly imposed representation. They are also anti-monuments?
MINUJÍN: I wouldn’t quite call them that. It has to do with the popular myths that the statues convey—they are national symbols. Like the Statue of Liberty, right now, as a symbol is technically sinking. It is totally lying down and the torch is extinguished. Before, the United States would welcome everyone, but now not so much. So, the statue has to be lying down and that will be my next project for the Venice Biennale next year. I am presenting this to the government for the Argentinian Pavilion, but I’m not sure if they are going to send me there. (laughs) I will do the Statue of Liberty lying down and then cover it with fake hamburgers. People will take one and change it for a real one at McDonalds locations all over the world.
Marta Minujín with El Obelisco acostado (The Obelisk lying down), Parque do Ibirapuera, São Paulo, Brazil, 1978
OBRIST: You’ve told me about the Obelisco de Pan Dulce and the Torre de Pan for James Joyce. Food is clearly an important aspect of your art—the idea of edible art. How did the concept of actually eating the artwork enter your practice?
MARTA MINUJÍN: The first edible artwork I created was the Venus de Milo made of cheese. I’ve always been fascinated by participatory art. The idea is similar to my early work, like La Menesunda: people engage directly, moving through the experience, eating, walking, and interacting. I want them to have moments they’ll never forget—like taking a bite from a Statue of Liberty made of hamburgers, or holding a slice of a bread-covered tower, or the Panettone Obelisk. I’ve made many edible monuments because I love for people to be active participants in my work, not just spectators.
OBRIST: You told me once that at ten years old, you suddenly knew you were an artist. Can you talk about this epiphany?
MARTA MINUJÍN: I knew I was an artist at five. I started making art when I was ten. I was a child that knew exactly what I wanted to do. I knew from the beginning. I'm very happy that I did it, but I suffered a lot because I've been very poor in New York, very poor in Argentina. But I got many grants. I received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966, so I could live on that.
OBRIST: Last year I saw the exhibition of your very early work at Kurimanzutto in New York. These pieces from the late 1950s emerge right at the moment when informalismo was a strong global force—in Europe, Latin America, even Asia. That’s also where your Catalogue Raisonné begins, with these first informal works. Alberto Greco was important to you then; he would point to a wall and say, “Look at this wonderful surface—I’ll sign it.” Already there was this shift in your attention, from painting an image to recognizing the wall itself as an object.
MARTA MINUJÍN: He was a very big influence on me. When I met him, I was sixteen. I was still in school, and I loved him so much as a friend. At the time, I was painting in a kind of surrealist style—I didn’t really know what I was doing. Then suddenly, I put the canvas on the floor and started working there. I made one painting that was inspired by Alberto Greco. I did many, many works—three or four a day. And then I destroyed almost all of them. Years later, we found some still in my studio; that’s why a few have reappeared now. After that, I began working with mattresses.
OBRIST: I'm very interested in this idea of the mattresses because the mattress works are continuing until today, and they're a very important aspect of your practice. What was the epiphany with the mattresses?
MARTA MINUJÍN: You are born, you make love, you give birth, you sleep, you die in a mattress. It's 50% of your life. And I needed a soft shape. So, I took the mattresses from my bed and glued them onto the canvas. Then I started adding cardboard boxes, mixing different materials with the mattresses. Little by little it grew. When I was living in Paris, I met Niki de Saint Phalle, and she said to me, “Why don’t you paint on the floor?” So, I painted the floor. That was it. I then visited a hospital and sourced some mattresses, which became some of my first mattress sculptures. After that, I abandoned painting objects—for maybe forty-five years. Instead, I focused on performances, happenings, and installations. Then, in 2014, I returned to the mattresses. Now I do both: some textile-based works—you probably saw one at Kurimanzutto—and, of course, the mattresses.
OBRIST: The mattresses also connect to your idea of the Soft Gallery, since softness was something you explored there as well. Can you talk about how you came to invent the Soft Gallery and what it meant for you?
MINUJÍN: This started in 1964 with a work called Roll Around In Bed and Live!, which you could actually go inside. I made it in Paris, because I was living in a place with no bathroom, no hot water, no heating. So, I built this house to protect myself. But I couldn’t sleep inside it—I just couldn’t. In the end, I destroyed it. After that, I made La Chambre d'Amour [The Chamber of Love] together with the Dutch artist Mark Brusse, who I was close to at the time. Then I went on to other projects. The last one from that Soft Gallery series was Erotics in Technicolor, for which I won the Di Tella Prize. With that prize I moved back to Paris and began working with technological art. I did many happenings with artists like Allan Kaprow and Wolf Vostell. In fact, in 2026, the Reina Sofía will present a major retrospective of my happenings and performances. That’s important, because I really began with happenings and performance in the mid-1960s. For example, in 1966 I did Three Country Happening using technology, and even earlier, in 1963, I staged La Destrucción [The Destruction], which was my very first happening.
“I built this house to protect myself. In the end, I destroyed it.”
Documentation of La Menesunda (Mayhem), Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires, 1965
Documentation of Simultaneidad en simultaneidad (Simultaneity in Simultaneity), 1966
OBRIST: There’s a clear connection between the Soft Gallery and La Destrucción. With the Soft Gallery, you wanted to create aspace where people could experience art in a softer, more sensorial way. But you also opened it up by inviting artists like Charlotte Moorman, Juan Downey, and Carolee Schneemann to stage performances and events there. In a way, that collaborative and performative dimension had already begun with La Destrucción in 1963.
MINUJÍN: I love happenings—I really love happenings. La Destrucción, yes. In that work, everything was destroyed. A lot of my works, destroyed. After that, in early 1965, I staged a huge happening called Suceso Plástico in a football stadium in Uruguay. I was very influenced by Fellini at the time. It was completely crazy: there was a helicopter dropping live chickens, people with chickens on their heads, motorcycles roaring through the crowd, and participants performing all sorts of theatrical acts. It’s hard to explain—it was so complex—but it all came together as this wild, chaotic, immersive spectacle.
OBRIST: Another really key happening was Mayhem, or La Menesunda. It remains one of your most important works to this day. You had David Lamelas and many other artists involved, and it included sixteen different urban environments. It took place at the Di Tella Institute on Florida Street in Buenos Aires. Can you tell us about it? In a way, it might be your biggest project, because you weren’t just making art—you wanted to reproduce the city itself.
MINUJÍN: Art critic, Pierre Restany called La Menesunda “Pop Lunfardo.” The title itself—menesunda, meaning “mayhem” in Lunfardo, which is slang—captures the chaotic energy of Buenos Aires streets, which we wanted to represent in the installation. I developed the idea with the artist Santantonín, and we invited others to help, but most left for grants, so only David Lamelas stayed. The piece reflects both the disorder and the rhythm of the city—it’s Pop Art, but very local, very Buenos Aires.
OBRIST: You described it as a labyrinth: one room was a refrigerator, another smelled like a dentist’s office, and in another, a couple lay in a bed. The installation even included scents, and it caused a scandal at the time. Can you tell me more about how it was a portrait of Buenos Aires?
MINUJÍN: I like people who don’t know anything about art. My idea is that people should live in art, not just look at it. Like a happening—you enter and are surprised by everything. Anything can happen.
OBRIST: You wanted to create surprise for the viewer.
MINUJÍN: Yes, people enter one by one, alone, and they have to react to each situation. Sometimes they’re completely enclosed and must dial a number to open the door. You find yourself inside an old telephone booth, and then you move on to another space. Each environment engages you differently. There are eleven situations inside. In one, a couple lies in bed—you can even talk with them. That couple stays in bed all day.
OBRIST: Like a living sculpture. And this was all at the Instituto Torcuato di Tella, which was integral to a major cultural moment in Argentina in the 1960s. What was so special about this institute?
MINUJÍN: At the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, we took over the whole institute and shared the space among ourselves. It was an incredible time. It was fantastic because, at the same time that Pop started in New York, we were starting in Argentina. The director, Jorge Romero Brest, sponsored our work. He didn’t care that we were only twenty years old or that we wanted to destroy art—museums, galleries, everything. He was so open-minded, so smart, so fantastic. He became my best friend.
OBRIST: Where did Jorge Romero Brest get the money to support these projects?
MINUJÍN: Brest was also an art critic and a philosopher, but he sponsored the artists through the Di Tella family. Torcuato di Tella was a wealthy industrialist. They had the biggest art collection in Italy, and they brought it to Argentina. The institute only lasted four years.
OBRIST: Why did it close? Because of the dictatorship?
MINUJÍN It closed because of the Onganía dictatorship [1966-1970]. But Argentina is always going through a dictatorship.
OBRIST: At one point, your work entered a whole new dimension with technology, which is now inspiring many younger artists. Billy Klüver created Experiments in Art and Technology [EAT], bringing artists and engineers together, which you were involved in as well. From the mid‑’60s onward, you began exploring this approach. I wanted to ask specifically about Simultaneidad, which is a pioneering work in this area.
MINUJÍN: I was following Marshall McLuhan at the time and admired him greatly. I read his book—Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964)—which completely captivated me. I was in Buenos Aires reading it, and it inspired me so much that I even went to Fordham University to try to meet him in person. His ideas about media as extensions of human senses and the way technology shapes our perception were revolutionary to me and influenced my approach to art. Before that, I had been doing happenings in Buenos Aires, but they weren’t technological. When I arrived in New York and finally met Allan Kaprow and Wolf Vostell, I asked them to collaborate on a Three Country Happening with me, using all kinds of media. This was one of the first times I integrated technology directly into performance. We communicated across different locations using telephone, radio, television, and even the Early Bird system, an interactive communication artwork I used to connect participants live across distances. Everything was carefully orchestrated so the audience became part of the work itself. Michael Kirby later wrote about that happening, recognizing its importance in merging art, technology, and audience participation. It was an incredible, pioneering experience, and it shaped the trajectory of my work from then on.
OBRIST: It’s interesting because Three Country Happening involved each artist creating a simultaneous happening in their own country: Vostell in Germany, Kaprow in the US, and you in Buenos Aires. You called your contribution Simultaneidad en simultaneidad (Simultaneity in Simultaneity). Can you explain how it worked, since it was so influenced by McLuhan and involved multiple screens?
MINUJÍN: For Simultaneidad, I invited sixty of the most famous people in Buenos Aires—actors, athletes, celebrities—because their presence was frequently covered in the newspapers. I asked them to come to the Instituto di Tella auditorium on two consecutive Mondays, dressed elegantly in black tie. I installed sixty TV sets, one for each participant. During the first session, we recorded their voices on the radio, took photographs, and filmed them as they arrived, sat down, and watched themselves on the television screens. When they returned the following Monday, all the film had been developed. They could see themselves on live television—broadcast through Buenos Aires’s two channels—and also watch Kaprow in the US and Vostell in Germany, performing simultaneously. The feeds were transmitted so they could experience these other happenings in real time. It was incredible: each person saw themselves on television while hearing their voices on the radio. Some participants even experienced a playful “media invasion”—a messenger would arrive at their home with a telegram or ring the bell unexpectedly, asking, ‘Are you this person?’ Then, they’d rush to pick up an old-fashioned telephone to engage with the event. At the time, this was an extraordinary invasion of media into daily life. Today, of course, we are completely saturated—everything comes through our iPhones, and our faces, voices, and actions are instantly documented and shared. Back then, it was a glimpse of how media couldtransform perception, identity, and experience.
Marta Minujín and Andy Warhol, El pago de la deuda externa argentina con maíz, “el oro latinoamericano” (Paying Off the Argentine Foreign Debt with Corn, “the Latinamerican corn”), 1985
Documentation of La destrucción (The Destruction), 1963
OBRIST: Before the iPhone, of course, we had the landline. Today, it’s almost an antique object—but in 1967, you created a visionary project called the Minuphone, which initially looked like a telephone booth. You worked with Per Biorn from Bell Telephone and connected with Billy Klüver’s Experiments in Art and Technology. How did it work?
MINUJÍN: Yes. I received a Guggenheim grant and used all the money to realize the project. Billy Klüver introduced me to an engineer who specialized in robotics, and together we built the Minuphone. I described all my ideas, and he made them a reality. We recreated a telephone booth so that when someone entered and made a call, unexpected effects would happen. Green water would rise and fall, then black water would obscure the view outside. It functioned like a color organ, with lights reacting to the interaction inside. As you spoke, your voice created an echo effect, so you might hear yourself repeating, “Hello ... hello? How are you?” The other person on the line could also hear this echo. At the same time, a screen with black light appeared, allowing you to play with your shadow, while numerous other interactive effects occurred. The most striking effect was a light directing you to look down, revealing yourself on a television embedded in the floor. A Polaroid camera would take your picture, so when you left, you could take home a snapshot of yourself in real time.In total, there were seven different interactive effects. On any given day, participants might experience variations—sometimes black light, sometimes the screen wouldn’t activate depending on the number dialed. Each experience was unique, which made the installation very dynamic and engaging.
OBRIST: In a way, the Minuphone led to the Minucode. I’m very interested in the Minucode because it represents a form of free technology—almost like an algorithmically determined dinner party that you designed.
MINUJÍN: Yes. I received a Rockefeller grant to create a project, and I decided to invest all the money into organizing a very unique event. I brought together forty economists, forty politicians, forty figures from the fashion world, and forty artists. It was a cocktail party with champagne, and I installed six cameras throughout the room so that the guests were filmed from every angle. They forgot they were being recorded, which created an intimate, spontaneous atmosphere. Before attending, each guest had to complete a questionnaire that was published in the newspapers. This way, everyone arrived having already seen the test and the others’ answers, so they were familiar with one another. I even tried to invite Robert Kennedy—I had seen him crossing the street in 1968, just before his assassination—and I asked his lawyer if he could attend. The party included fashion icons like Veruschka, designers, and models, as well as artists—though initially I had planned for only forty, eventually eighty artists showed up. People came even without formal invitations because, in American society at the time, everyone knew about events hosted by the Center for Inter-American Relations. Charlotte Moorman, for example, brought a cello and performed in a corner. The following week, I organized a structured interaction at a gallery with a projection of the event: each guest had ten minutes to move through different groups—politicians, economists, fashion figures, and artists. The idea was to create a dynamic, fluid social environment where everyone engaged across disciplines. Moorman’s performance was integrated into this setting, adding an artistic layer to the social experiment. The whole project was a combination of social choreography, technology, and participatory art.
OBRIST: Can you talk about your time in New York, meeting Andy Warhol.
MINUJÍN: I was a hippie. When I arrived in New York, I visited all the galleries and went to Leo Castelli’s. I met Andy Warhol, who became my best friend at the time, as well as Nam June Paik, Rauschenberg, and many others I admired. I spent time in the Cedar Bar with people like Carlos Slim. Then, someone introduced me to LSD, and I became fully immersed in the hippie lifestyle—I abandoned art for three years, living in Central Park until around 1970 or ’71. During that time, I met figures like Charlie Chaplin and musicians such as Jimi Hendrix and Johnny Winter, all part of Steve Paul’s scene. I took LSD daily, almost as a spiritual practice. Romero Brest visited me in New York, and I was living barefoot in the summer, never wearing shoes—which, as you can imagine, left my feet in poor condition. I decided to bring the hippie culture to Argentina. Romero Brest asked if I wanted to do something in detail, and I said yes. I imported psychedelic aesthetics, including lights, film, sound equipment, and techniques I had seen at rock concerts. I also brought acid and shared it with young people who helped me organize events. I had them dress like Hare Krishnas, and I transformed spaces with black lights, strobe lights, silver rooms, incense, and music. It became a full immersion in the hippie lifestyle, and many young people in Argentina followed this cultural wave. After some time, I returned to New York, and the hippie scene had vanished there. It was an intense, transformative period, both personally and culturally, that influenced my later work in immersive and participatory art.
OBRIST: You also created a performance-based economic exchange. In the 1980s, as Argentina faced a looming default on its foreign debt, you explained that, as the ‘Queen of Art’ in Argentina and Warhol the ‘King of New York,’ you symbolized your respective economic systems. You organized a performance in which you delivered his studio as a supportive act—connecting art, economy, and politics in a way that feels especially relevant today.
MINUJÍN: I became friends with Andy Warhol in the 1960s. I went to all the parties with him and even met Dalí, because Dalí would host underground artists every day at the Sunrise Hotel, and Andy was always there. After I returned to live in Argentina, I continued seeing Andy whenever I visited New York—we went to parties, exhibitions, and events together. I decided that, as the ‘Queen of Art’ in Argentina and Andy as the ‘King of New York,’ we could resolve things symbolically. I invited him to participate in a performance where I would pay Argentina’s debt to him in corn—because corn is Latin American gold. Historically, Latin America supplied food during the First and Second World Wars, so corn represented both sustenance and value. He accepted, and the project became a platform for performance, economy, and artistic exchange. I repeated this concept later with a Margaret Thatcher lookalike at the ICA in London, and with an Angela Merkel lookalike at Documenta 14 in Athens. Each time, the project combined economics, symbolism, and art in a performative and humorous way.
OBRIST: What’s fascinating about your work is its focus on process. This issue’s theme is work in progress—literally and philosophically, things are always evolving. That seems very true for your art, which is constantly in motion. The process never stops. “My idea is that people should live in art, not just look at it.”
MINUJÍN: My work is philosophical. And it never stops. With the Statue of Liberty lying down at the Venice Biennale, I always have the next project in mind.
OBRIST: Speaking of process, what does a day in your studio look like?
MINUJÍN: I go there to work, and new ideas come to me constantly. My mind never stops—I have too much imagination. When someone says, “I want to make a film,” I say, “Go for it!” It’s amazing.
OBRIST: I wanted to talk a little bit more about the show at Kurimunzutto. The title is To Live in Art. That seems to be a very important aspect linking many of your works—to live in art. Can you explain that a little bit?
MINUJÍN: Yes, because with everything—the Menesunda, all my work—the idea is that people live in art. They inhabit situations where you can’t say you’re outside of art; it’s completely immersive. Even with the monuments and all my other projects, it’s about living in art. I truly believe life could be richer if people experience art this way, because art creates something unique within each individual. But sometimes you have to guide them into it—they won’t necessarily sense the energy on their own, you see?