Celeste Talks DIY Attitudes and Mexican Hospitality
Mexico City-based artist duo Celeste, Gabriel Rosas Alemán and María Fernanda Camarena, craft fabric-based installations across galleries, museums, and community spaces. The duo recently unveiled an outdoor installation at The Bentway in Toronto entitled Sun/Shade, which will feature community workshops and performances throughout the summer. On June 12th, a few days before the closing of their first solo exhibition with Rebecca Camacho Presents, Babatunji Johnson and Marusya Madubuko will stage a dance performance in response to Celeste’s installation.
Inherently collaborative, their work lends itself to partnership across the arts and community members. In this interview, they discuss how their practice is rooted in collaboration, community activation, and taking care of one another.
Installation view of Celeste, Hacer Brotar / To Sprout, 2025. Photo by Robert Divers Herrick. Courtesy Rebecca Camacho Presents, San Francisco.
Meinzer: You’ve been busy with your show at Rebecca Camacho Presents and your piece at The Bentway.
María Fernanda Camarena: Yeah, Rebecca Camacho was great. We were very busy at the beginning of the year, but it’s a different type of busy—like the busy that you get to enjoy.
Gabriel Rosas Alemán: It was nice to work on both projects in parallel. We finished the Bentway Project show and the Rebecca Camacho show almost at the same time. So it was a very intense early 2025—it was also the first time we worked on two big projects at the same time. We had more time to prepare Rebecca Camacho, to develop the narrative we wanted to be present.
M: You were studying El Agua Es El Origen De La Vida by Diego Rivera. Can you give me a bit of the process and approach you took to studying?
MFC: So actually, the reference, which became the main reference for the project, came during the evolution of the creative process. It was not the starting point—we found it along the way, and that was actually very nice. This mural is in the Bosque de Chapultapec in Mexico City, a large park located in the center of the city. It's a very special place because it’s deep into the park, not super accessible. It was created in the 50s to be both a monument and a functional building that could commemorate the water system in Mexico City. The city’s water access begins in this area of the park, and the water would distribute to the whole city from that one building.
GRA: We were fascinated by the history of this mural, but also with the history of the building itself and the infrastructure that was created in order to bring water into the city. It was a big inspiration for the Rebecca Camacho project—initially we wanted to create a garden.
MFC: The idea of the garden is within our pictorial space and narrative, because that’s how we consider our work. We were thinking of planting a garden, but there’s all this infrastructure to make life possible in a gallery space, and that’s just an insane idea. That’s why we decided to really focus on the water flows and how architecture is used to kind of direct the water. So it’s also why the mural became so significant to the process. And it’s not the first time that we thought about Rivera’s work. It’s funny—we never thought we would be Rivera’s fans.
GRA: Our fascination with Diego’s work started while doing a Celeste project. Someone pointed out that it resembled our work related to the muralist period. We started to do our own research about the movement, especially in Mexico City, and then became fascinated with Rivera’s work. He painted so many public buildings, it gives the sensation of being embraced by one painting. But also, Diego’s work is full of motifs and propaganda, and with Celeste, we are not using the same technique; we’re approaching the political aspects differently.
Celeste, ¡Qué llueva, qué llueva!, 2025. Pigments and acrylic base on dyed cotton canvas. 66 x 109 inches (167.6 x 276.9 cm). Photo by Ramiro Chavez. Courtesy of Rebecca Camacho Presents, San Francisco.
M: I think there is certainly a political argument to be made of your work, but definitely different to Diego’s. But at the same time, Diego is such a community-centered figure, and that seems to be so much of what your work is. Your projects are inherently collaborative, and there’s even more opportunity for community and collaboration.
I wanted to spend some time focussing on the mediums you’re working with. Personally, I found that dyeing fabric trained me to be a better painter, because with the dye, there’s not much you can control. Your pieces also have such a painterly quality.
GRA: The dyeing process was an accidental resource because at the beginning, we were just inspired by what we found in our kitchen pantry. We were trying to find which elements we could use from the kitchen to make colors, but quickly realized that maintaining these colors from a natural dying process is quite difficult. We switched to artificial dye and found we could make a variety of textures. Instead of using hot water, we started to use cold baths which produced a different effect. So we learned different elements to manipulate the texture of the dye—we love the one that looks like water ripples and another one that looks like a membrane. I really love that texture; it resembles something natural as well. But that’s just the base: on top of that, we start painting with other materials.
MFC: We use acrylic to paint on top of the dye canvas. We use a lot of water—we mix the acrylic base and the pigment, and then we add more water than would normally be recommended, because we’re thinking of these colors more like watercolor, like washes of paint that maintains the movement and the flexibility of the fabric.
M: That’s why I love fabric dyeing. It lends itself so well to that fluidity. The fabric dye holds that movement so well because it becomes embedded into the membrane of the fabric.
MFC: That’s a very important note in relation to our last topic of muralism. We’re speaking about these murals that are solid, that are in public, official buildings. Working with fabric is different from that. Fabrics are flexible and foldable. You can travel with them. You can make them very small, ship them, and then, boom—a whole world opens up.
M: That gets back to the earlier conversation about the political presence of your work. The flexibility of the fabric is a defining characteristic for a political reading of your work. It’s community-oriented, it can travel anywhere, and you can reinstall it in a variety of spaces and architectures.
GRA: Another aspect of the cotton fabric is the information of the material itself. We have this relation with it because it’s what we wear: T-shirts, trousers, jackets, and so on. The installations also bring an element of protection. For example, an installation can bring shade into a space, because it’s a big canopy, or at another moment, is a big curtain. The installations give the sensation of protection and shelter once you’re inside the space. The material associations are also really nice and are related to the idea of flexibility and the aspect of traveling, and living with this material.
Installation view of Celeste, Sun/Shade, 2025. Photo by Mila Bright Zlatanovic. Courtesy of The Bentway.
M: Your work feels so site-specific. The piece at Rebecca Camacho—or just maybe anything in a gallery—feels so different from what the Bentway piece will be, or some of your projects in museums or public spaces. Is there a difference between installing in a gallery versus outdoors versus a museum?
MFC: There are certain limitations within the space of a gallery, but then again, our way of approaching it was: How can we transform the way people move around this space—a space that they are already familiar with? With an institution, there is an educational team or other kinds of public programming. If there’s a possibility to work with programming, we almost always go for it. It fulfills the purpose of the piece in that space. When we are invited to another city, we are just visitors—we don’t know the space. It’s always important to leave space for the people that live there, for the people that use those spaces, for the people that actually know this area.
M: The Bentway installation seems like such a great marriage between institutional infrastructure and your community-oriented practice. What programming do you have planned for the space?
MFC: The canopy at the Bentway is going to be in an area that they use for multiple activities. They have a whole program going throughout the summer in the area where it’s installed. For the opening weekend, we’re hosting a workshop, a playspace for children centered around the motif of the canopy, and a workbook we created for the piece, which gives a glimpse of the process: the references and our mindset when creating this canopy. It’s designed to shade a sunny area—people will take refuge from the sun underneath it.
M: What about your experience working in Mexico? Mexico City is experiencing a boisterous art world moment. Does the government support the arts?
GRA: Well, during our time working as Celeste, we haven’t done any government exhibitions or invitations. The opportunities in Mexico come from private investments, private collectors, or private galleries who are interested in what is happening in Mexico. The sensation of high energy isn’t coming from the government—they’re mostly private initiatives, both from abroad and domestically.
M: From my understanding of Mexico City, there seems to be this threat of gentrification that comes inherently with the rise of the arts scene, similar to what’s happening in Athens right now.
MFC: Yes, gentrification. It’s a global problem. Mexican culture is very service-oriented and welcoming. That’s a beautiful trait—I don’t want that to go away—but it’s also complicated, because you’re always kind of bending yourself for the foreigner.
Since we were in art school, we’ve been working in artist-run spaces. Then, when we started Celeste, we also did a lot of self-generated projects. Like: Oh, so the invitation is not there—okay, let’s just create it ourselves and make it accessible, make it not very expensive. We wanted to see the vision come together, invite people over, and share it. I also feel like in Mexico, a lot of things keep moving and going because people are very inventive.
Installation view featuring Celeste (Gabriel Rosas Alemán, left, and María Fernanda Camarena, right) in front of Sun/Shade 2025. Courtesy of Celeste and The Bentway.
M: I like that spirit of, Oh, the institutions aren’t going to fund us? Let’s just do it ourselves. I think that right now, the US needs to take a page out of that book—everyone here needs to get with it quick. Things are going to keep moving. Art is going to keep happening.
MFC: In the end, making art is like also getting together and talking about art. It’s about thinking in terms of art making. It’s a space of mind and a way of interacting, and that means maintaining the spaces where we do that. And of course, we need to make a living, and that’s also why there are all these other projects, like in gallery spaces. But it’s definitely a balance.
M: I’m thinking back to what you said about Mexican culture being centered around hosting and taking care of people. The Bentway installation follows that mentality of hosting and giving back to people.
GRA: That’s kind of how Celeste started. Fernanda and I were living in a small town outside Mexico City, and every time we had friends and family visiting us, it was an opportunity to try new things, like hiking and cooking and hosting. We discovered that we were really good hosts. Then we thought, What if we bring our house into the exhibition space? Oh, that’s so nice. From there, Celeste started.
Celeste: Hacer brotar / To sprout is on view at Rebecca Camacho Projects from May 1 through June 14, 2025.
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
