Act 3 Juan Pablo Macías
Action 3 of The World’s Heaving Breath
After presenting the works of Margherita Moscardini and Bart Houwers, The World’s Heaving Breath enters its third “Act” (April 9–19), focusing on two projects by Mexican artist Juan Pablo Macías: the WORD+MOIST PRESS publishing project and the printed archives of NO PUBLIC – ONLY PEOPLE.
The exhibition opened on April 9 at Fishead Lab. The artist was present and engaged in dialogue with the audience. Curators Yin Shuai and Khemerin Vismara attended the opening, with special guest Hou Hanru also present in support.
Juan Pablo Macías’s practice spans publishing, installation, and performance, consistently centering on the relationship between language, knowledge, and social structures. Working from an anarchist perspective, he critically reflects on existing systems of representation and institutional logic, while using “expanded publishing” as a means to return knowledge to public circulation.
In his work, “publishing” is not merely a medium but a form of action: through the re-editing, translation, and dissemination of historical texts, obscured ideas regain their agency in the present. At the same time, he continues to explore de-intermediated models of artistic economy, seeking to challenge established relationships between artists, institutions, and audiences.
WORD+MOIST PRESS
WORD+MOIST PRESS is a long-term publishing project initiated by Juan Pablo Macías in 2014, comprising five volumes to date. Through translation, editing, and republication, the project brings ideas from different historical moments into the present context.
From the critique of private property by José Oiticica (1882–1957), a key theorist of the Brazilian anarchist movement in the early 20th century; to the utopian social experiment of Albert Kimsey Owen (1847–1916), founder of the socialist colony in Topolobampo on Mexico’s Pacific coast; to Boris Arvatov (1896–1940)’s analysis of everyday objects and relations of production; and Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935)’s avant-garde engagement within Moscow anarchism—these historical cases clearly reveal a genealogy between creativity and anarchism. From Post-Impressionism and Dada to contemporary artistic practices, this connection continues to unfold.
In this exhibition, these publications are presented not only as reading materials but also as artworks within the exhibition space. They are available on-site, and their sales continue to support the artist’s ongoing publishing projects.
WORD+MOIST PRESS VOLUME 1 (2014)
The Anarchist Doctrine Accessible to All
First volume of Word+Moist Press written in 1925 by José Oiticica a philologist, poet and anarchist.
Edited by Juan Pablo Macías
Original title, A Doutrina Anarquista ao Alcance de Todos, 1925
Author, José Rodrigues Leite e Oiticica
Translation, Agencia Transitiva (Rio de Janeiro)
Editorial Design, Zirkumflex (Berlin), Sara López and Brice Delarue
Printed in September 2014 in Tipografia Debatte, Livorno, Italy.
18 x 12 cm
173 pages
1000 copies
WORD+MOIST PRESS VOLUME 2 (2015)
Problemas del Momento en Nueve Estudios Breves
Second volume of Word+Moist Press written in 1896 by Albert Kimsey Owen, founder of a socialist colony in the town of Topolobampo, situated on the Pacific Ocean in western Mexico.
Editado por Juan Pablo Macías
Título original, Problems of the Hour in Nine Brief Studies, 1896
Autor, Albert Kimsey Owen
Traducción, Michelle Vera Proyecto
gráfico, Zirkumflex (Berlin) zirkumflex.com (Brice Delarue)
Contenido Visual, Juan Pablo Macías.
Publicado por WORD+MOIST PRESS y ediciones el mojado Impreso en Octubre de 2015 en Tipografía Debatte, Livorno, Italia.
La traducción se realizó con el apoyo del Museo Ex Teresa Arte Actual de la Ciudad de México, para la exposición "Acciones Territoriales" curada por Daniela Lieja
18 x 12 cm
120 pages
1000 copies
WORD+MOIST PRESS VOLUME 3, 2020
Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing
Edited by Juan Pablo Macías
Original title, быт и культура вещи, 1925
Author, Boris Arvatov
English, Spanish and Italian translations, Christina Kiaer, 1997, Michelle Aguilar Vera, 2015, Viola Cateni, 2019
Graphic project, Zirkumflex (Berlin) zirkumflex.com (Brice Delarue and Juan Pablo Macías)
Visual content, Juan Pablo Macías “бытие-творчество,” 2019
(Tattoo made by Elena Bertoni)
Published by WORD+MOIST PRESS, 2020
Printed in January 2020 in Media Print, Livorno, Italy.
WORD+MOIST PRESS VOLUME 4, 2020
Anti in Anarkhiia-Tvorchestvo By Kazimir Malevich
Edited by Juan Pablo Macías
Author, Kazimir Malevich, 1918
English and Spanish translations, Alfredo Gurza, 2019
Graphic project, Zirkumflex (Berlin) (Brice Delarue and Juan Pablo Macías)
Visual content, Juan Pablo Macías “АНАРХlЯ,” 2019
(Tattoo made by Elena Bertoni)
Published by WORD+MOIST PRESS, 2020 With the support of Gian Marco Casini - GMCG.
Printed in January 2020 in Media Print, Livorno, Italy.
NO PUBLIC – ONLY PEOPLE
In dialogue with his publishing practice, the exhibition presents archival material of NO PUBLIC – ONLY PEOPLE, a work created by Juan Pablo Macías in 2020 and the final project of Salvator Rosa. Through graffiti interventions in abandoned spaces, the work radically rejects the notion of the “public” as defined by the cultural industry and systems of circulation. It negates structures such as “public,” “data,” and “uniformity,” and instead advocates a return to real “people,” emphasizing that art should take place through direct and equal exchanges between individuals.
Salvator Rosa is a highly experimental and anti-conventional artistic project. It constitutes a radical reflection on the logics of production, distribution, and consumption in contemporary art, and embodies the artist’s concept of a “commercial gallery without a gallerist.”
Curatorial Statement
In book “Infancy and History”, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben interpreted the lack of experience and the predicament of modernity in contemporary society as a rupture between "language" and "speech". Behind this rupture is the fact that when we use "language," we no longer construct subjective experience, which directly leads to the ossification and failure of inherent experience. On one hand, this makes "speech" no longer effective as an action; on the other, "language" is reduced to a rigid form. To attempt to escape the lack of experience in modernity, rather than searching for a new empiricism and risking falling back into a logic of rupture, we should focus on reconstructing the severed relationships in history.
In Juan Pablo Macías's artistic practice, the publishing project “Word+Moist Press”, initiated in 2014, is an important practice in this reconstruction of relationships. The title of the project—the artist adds "Moist" after "Word"—as seen in the editor's note of the first issue, where Macías jumps away from the dualism opposition between humans and nature, posing the rhetorical question: "What else can a seed be, if not thought? ... What else can thought be, if not the productive process of the universe, if not the univocal production process of humanity and nature as a unified whole, as desire?" Through historical observation of the logic of thought and knowledge production, the artist discovered that the pursuit of truth by rationalism constructed under the experience of Western modernity is, in essence, a simplified binary opposition.
This fragmentation of experience and the rupture of the originally unified relationship have also caused a lack of reality and the desiccation of language. However, true vitality has not disappeared; it is hidden in the moisture of speech, its germination, and its warm tremors. Re-moistening text with thought and re-providing imagination for our reality has thus become the core of Juan Pablo Macías's anarchist practice.
Another point of focus in the “Word+Moist Press” project is the choice of the action and behavior of "translation." "Translation" here is not a blind following of "major languages" from a linguistic and cultural perspective, but a "temporal" artistic practice—translating past time and scenes into the present. Past thoughts should not be regarded as relics of a distant past but are still powerful tools for conceiving and practicing "possible futures" today. The re-reading and invocation of these thought models become the production logic of our current culture.
In the first issue, “Word+Moist” translated anarchist José Oiticica's A Doutrina Anarquista ao Alcance de Todos (1925), which deeply analyzes how "private property" became the source of human suffering; in the second issue, the magazine chose Albert Kimsey Owen's Problemas Del Momento (1896) to unearth indigenous utopian practices in Latin America, closely linking "the land" with "social organization"; in the third issue, through a focus on Boris Arvatov, it turned to the relationship between property rights, production, and daily life, exploring how to change society by changing our relationship with "objects"; the fourth issue, ANARKHIIA-TVORCHESTVO, derived from Russian, meaning "Anarchy-Creation," presents a sense of urgency similar to underground publications (Samizdat), as if the words are restless on the paper, ready to germinate at any time; in the fifth issue, Mouth Pieces in Bad English, published in 2021, the space for textual editing and magazine practice continues to expand, becoming space, theater, and a cry of voices.
Continuing the thoughts and practices in Word+Moist, the work shown on the wall is NO PUBLIC - ONLY PEOPLE, created by artist in 2020. The artist spray-painted poetry in abandoned spaces, using an anarchist tone to denounce the deprivation of vivid life by rigid social systems.
Yin Shuai
Artist
Juan Pablo Macías (b. 1974, Puebla, Mexico) is a Livorno-based artist and curator whose multidisciplinary practice—spanning editorial projects, performance, and installations—critically examines systems of representation through the lens of anarchism. By contrasting hegemonic authority with "insurrectional knowledge," Macías utilizes "expanded publishing" through platforms like TIEMPO MUERTO and WORD+MOIST PRESS to divert institutional resources toward the socialization of libertarian thought. His work frequently extends into social and ecological architectures, such as the autonomous seed bank BAS and the gallerist-free commercial model Salvator Rosa, both of which challenge the traditional economic dynamics of the art industry. A prolific curator and co-director of the Carico Massimo association and the MG 48° 50° foundation, Macías has exhibited his research-driven work globally at venues including the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, MUAC in Mexico City, and various international biennials.
Within the framework of Fishead Lab’s Flowing Banquet program, the exhibition The World's Heaving Breath is curated by Yin Shuai and young collector Khemerin Vismara. The exhibition title is drawn from Rainer Maria Rilke’s 1922 poetry cycle Sonnets to Orpheus, taking the rhythmic movement of “breath” as a connective medium through which to respond to contemporary conditions.
The exhibition unfolds through five interrelated “acts,” each lasting ten days, forming a sequence of dialogues. The participating artists come from diverse backgrounds: Marie Cool Fabio Balducci (France, 1961; Italy, 1964), Bart Houwers (Netherlands, 1997), Liu Ding (China, 1976), Juan Pablo Macias (Mexico, 1974), and Margherita Moscardini (Italy, 1981).
Their practices unfold like the movement of breath: maintaining individual autonomy while remaining inseparably interconnected. Together, they shape a collective inquiry into the dynamics of perception and the construction of meaning through artistic production. From their critical perspectives, the exhibition invites viewers to engage experientially with overlooked connections, and—amid an anticipation of ongoing instability—to rediscover possibilities for inhabiting the world and its structures.
Project duration: March 5 – May 17, 2026
Location: Fishead Lab, Via Eugenio Camerini 2, Milan
The World's Heaving Breath
March 5 – March 15: Margherita Moscardini
March 19 – March 29: Bart Houwers
April 9 – April 19: Juan Pablo Macias
April 23 – May 3: Liu Ding
May 7 – May 17: Marie Cool Fabio Balducci
Presented by Fishead Lab
Graphic Design: Wang Yuxuan
Project Coordinator: Zhou Ziqi
Communications: Liu Ziwei
Exhibition Installation: Tan Di