Conversations | Paris then and on: Marta Minujín and Frida Escobedo

Marta Minujín, Artist, Buenos Aires 
Frida Escobedo, Founder and Principal, Frida Escobedo Studio, Mexico City and New York
Moderator: Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, Serpentine, London 

Paris belongs to those who shape it. Avant-garde Argentine artist Marta Minujín and Mexican architect Frida Escobedo are among those visionaries. In a conversation moderated by Serpentine Artistic Director Hans Ulrich Obrist, Minujín will revisit her radical Paris happenings of the 1960s, including La destrucción, in which she set ablaze her own mattress sculptures. Escobedo will share her vision for the Centre Pompidou’s 2030 renewal, developed with lead architect Moreau Kusunoki. The dialogue will explore memory and reinvention, destruction and restoration, and Paris’s enduring power as a laboratory of cultural change. 

Marta Minujín is a pioneering Argentine visual artist known for her avant-garde, playful, and participatory work. She studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes Manuel Belgrano and the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredón in Buenos Aires. In 1961, she received a scholarship to study in Paris, where she created her first performance, La destrucción (1963). Upon returning to Buenos Aires, she won the Torcuato Di Tella Institute National Award for ¡Revuélquese y viva! (1964), her first interactive installation. In 1965, she co-created La Menesunda – a groundbreaking multi-sensory experience – with Rubén Santantonín. A Guggenheim Fellowship took her to New York in 1966, where she collaborated on major media projects such as Simultaneity in Simultaneity (with Allan Kaprow and Wolf Vostell) and Minuphone (1967). Throughout the 1970s, she lived between the US and Argentina, staging iconic happenings and performances such as Interpenning (1972), Kidnappening (1973), La Academia del Fracaso (1975), and Comunicando con tierra (1976). Her work – marked by color, humor, social critique, and ephemeral materials like mattresses and inflatables – has been exhibited worldwide, cementing her place as a major figure in contemporary Latin American art. 

Frida Escobedo founded her studio in Mexico City in 2006, gaining early recognition with projects such as Hotel Boca Chica (2008), El Eco Pavilion (2010), and La Tallera Siqueiros (2012). She achieved international acclaim in 2018 as the youngest architect to date to design the Serpentine Pavilion in London. In 2022, she became the first woman to design a wing for the Metropolitan Museum of Art with the Tang Wing for Modern and Contemporary Art. Frida Escobedo Studio is the associate designer, collaborating with lead architect Moreau Kusunoki, on the Centre Pompidou 2030 renovation.  

Hans Ulrich Obrist is the artistic director of Serpentine in London, and the senior advisor at LUMA Arles. Prior to this, he was the curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show ‘World Soup (The Kitchen Show)’ in 1991, he has curated more than 350 exhibitions. Obrist’s publications include Ways of Curating (2015); The Age of Earthquakes (2015); Lives of the Artists, Lives of Architects (2015); The Extreme Self: Age of You (2021); 140 Ideas for Planet Earth (2021); Édouard Glissant: Archipelago (2021); James Lovelock: Ever Gaia (2023); Remember to Dream (2023); and Une vie in progress (2023).