Q+A #011: Mario Ballesteros [Curator + Founder of Ballista Design Consultancy]
🇲🇽 Cultural Sensibility 🪟 Home as Vitrine 🍥 Wild and Instinctive 👅 Anti-Tastemaking 💩 Get-Shit-Done (No Matter What) 🗿 Indigenous Art and Memory
‘Storied Spaces’ is the RIALTO newsletter featuring ‘Q+A’, a bi-weekly column that features guest curators from the community, whom we invite to share inspiration from their home library. In each edit, you will hear from creatives we admire about the analogue inspirations that inform their work and vision.
Mario Ballesteros is a San Miguel de Allende, Mexico–based founder of BALLISTA, a design consultancy, as well as an independent curator, editor, and researcher in the fields of design and architecture. Over the last 15 years, he has become a significant force in Mexican design, both elevating emerging talent and celebrating established artists, architects, and designers.
Instagram: @marioballe @ballista.space
Website: ballista.space
Email: hola@ballista.space
Q+A
[001] What was the artist or designer who moved you the most and why?
I’ve always been most inspired by the dozens of young Mexican designers, artists and architects I’ve had the chance to work with. There’s a collective energy here that’s hard to name and impossible to fully get a grip on. If there’s one thing that characterizes this energy, it’s a hands-on willingness to get shit done (no matter what) and to push boundaries whenever possible. That really resonates with me.
The majority of creative practices in Mexico operate hand in hand with precariousness. There’s no pampering from schools, no cushion of an established market, no prissiness. What comes out of that is something sort of wild and instinctive, but actually also a time-tested way of shaping our own environment in our own terms, echoing traditional artisans and autoconstruction. I admire that collective drive and spirit far more than any single “author”, “tastemaker” or any sort of individualistic heroic figure.
[002] Describe your dream project if you had no budget restraints.
I guess my dream project isn’t really an interior: it’s a summer school / residency program / temporary refuge in San Miguel de Allende, the town in central Mexico where I’ve been living for the past five years, and which has its own rich history of cultural influx.
It would host artisans, artists and thinkers from places that are redefining design from the margins, geographically speaking or in terms of unconventional approaches to discipline. Rooted in arts-and-crafts, but engaging with critical issues: displacement and violence, technology and dehumanization, climate change. I don’t think much about how it would look, but more about what it would do and how it would shift things.
In Mexico, there’s an overlooked link between the rich craft traditions of places like Guanajuato (the state where San Miguel is), Oaxaca, Jalisco or Michoacán, which are also plagued by poverty, violence, displacement and environmental challenges. I think whatever we define as craft or design or making that is relevant today should explore those connections.
(If anyone’s interested in making it happen or being a part of it, let me know.)
[003] What has piqued your interest lately?
Honestly, the thing I could not be less interested in right now is design trends, trade shows, capsule collections, or anything that smells like business as usual. Design can’t afford to be about “nice stuff,” “cute vibes,” or “iconic interiors.” We can’t let the noise and the bullshit override the real power of shaping things, especially when those things affect how we live and the kind of mark we leave behind.
If you don’t have a clear, vocal stance on fascism or genocide; if you’re not actively questioning how your actions, work, habits, and obsessions are contributing to a world going down the hole (or making it better, if you’re lucky); if you’re not willing to risk privilege or position to call out injustice for fear of losing a job, a client, or a project, then I’m not interested. At least not right now.
[004] What do you look for in designers or artists you want to work with?
Everything above: commitment, rigorous questioning, social and environmental conscience, cultural sensibility, and clear, consequential action.
[005] Can you share images of your interior and tell us a bit about it?
I live in a small house with a big yard, in a pretty small town with a pretty big cultural scene that is rooted in tradition but also surprisingly open and diverse. I honestly couldn’t ask for more.
Whenever I bring something into the house (for a pop-up, a workshop, or a temporary show) I think of it as inviting someone over. I want to be drawn to it instinctively, from the gut. I want it to catch my attention, make me curious or even jealous, make me want to know more about it than to talk about myself.
When you brand a space too explicitly as an extension of your own taste or personal mythology, it gets boring really fast. I’m not interested in telling people what they should or shouldn’t buy, wear, display or be. I care much more about bringing different ideas and voices into my everyday life, and then inviting others (clients, collectors, creatives, friends) to join in on the conversation.
I. ‘4000 Years of Mexican Architecture’ edited by Pedro Ramírez Vázquez (1956)
I love bringing this book up whenever I hear someone (usually a self-proclaimed “expert” expat living in Condesa or Roma who somehow hasn’t found the time to learn Spanish yet) saying they’ve “discovered” something about Mexico. Amiga, we’ve been here, doing what we do, for a while now.
II. ‘Mexican Homes Series’ published by the Architectural Publishing Book Co
These days, whenever I work on a project, I dive back into this lovely series of books on Mexican interiors published first in the 1960s and then in the 1980s by the Architectural Publishing Book Co. Authored by Verna Cook Shipway and Warren Shipway, and later by Patricia W. O’Gorman, these small black-and-white hardcover books are a quiet treasure.
Super detailed, super dense, super didactic. An incredible archive of architectural and decorative photos and sketches, construction techniques, and a mix of old historic and mid-century domestic spaces that make you feel all warm and dreamy.
They also make you a little sad about everything we’ve lost: the quality of how we build and inhabit our homes, and the incredible care that used to go into the everyday, in a very nurturing, non-performative way.
III. ‘Arte y Memoria Indígena de México (Indigenous Art and Memory of Mexico)’ (2014)
This book documents the vast, invaluable collection of Mexico’s National Institute of Indigenous Peoples: over 30,000 ritual and functional objects from more than 60 different indigenous peoples across Mexico, dating from the 17th century to today.
There is more wealth and substance in a single page of this catalog than in the last decade of coffee-table books, lifestyle magazines, or Instagram accounts orbiting anything Mexican.
IG Accounts to follow?
– @chamula.hechoamano
– @clasicos.mexicanos
– @tribalerobooks
– Plugging my own @mexicanezas because that’s where I post everything that inspires me about Mexican material and visual culture
