As part of ACT Basel Performance Festival der Schweizer Kunsthochschulen, Lux Valladolid presented Are you an NPC?. The performance subtly yet precisely blended into the festival’s environment, replicating the way digital technologies infiltrate everyday life: unannounced, without overtly disrupting the rhythm, yet reconfiguring the dynamics of the institutional space from within. As with digital technologies, the work asked neither permission nor forgiveness: it seeped in without notice, interrupting the museum in a nearly imperceptible but decisive way.
The intervention unfolded within a context full of layers: the festival took place at the Kunstmuseum Basel and intersected with an exhibition dedicated to the Italian artist Medardo Rosso, whose practice revolves around sculpture as gesture, process, and temporality. From this convergence, Valladolid asks: what does it mean to intervene in the city of performance, within a performance festival, while the museum proposes to read sculpture through a performative lens? Inspired by a phrase from Rosso “Nothing is material in space”the artist challenges the limits of institutional action and reflects on the place of performance within those frameworks.
The work stems from Are You an NPC?, an ongoing research project developed during her residency at Atelier Mondial, supported by Pro Helvetia South America. The project centers around the figure of the NPC (Non-Playable Character), a secondary video game character who merely repeats preset behaviors, without agency or deviation. Starting from this archetype, the artist explores ways of inhabiting public and institutional space through presences that do not demand attention, yet silently and deliberately alter the environment.
The work is structured around a central question: what happens when something does not seek to be seen, yet still produces a crack in collective perception? It explores that friction between the visible and the unnoticed, in tune with the way digital devices operate on bodies and behavior without declaring their influence.
Photos: Baran Ceylan
Curator: Ayelén Ruiz
