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Between language and experience
exists an unfinished garden.
—Michael Nardone


Unfinished Garden (Jardín Inconcluso in spanish) is a monographic exhibition by Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, conceived as a slow passage through perception, memory, and participation. Installed across the Sculpture Garden, the main atrium, and the Sala Gamboa of the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, the exhibition unfolds as a one-kilometer walk through Chapultepec Forest, activated after dusk. Over the course of their visit, the public traverses a sequence of nine large-scale installations that respond to presence, voice, heat, movement, and time—works that exist less as static objects than as systems awaiting activation.


The exhibition takes its title seriously. Here, the “unfinished” is not a state of incompletion to be remedied, but a deliberate refusal of closure, mastery, and totality. Against the modernist desire for coherence, purity, and control—often entangled with colonial, extractive, and patriarchal models of knowledge—Unfinished Garden proposes indeterminacy as both method and ethics. The works are unfinished because they are contingent: they depend on bodies passing through them, on atmospheric conditions, on technological detection, on historical context, and on one another. They change, misbehave, overlap, and sometimes fail. In this sense, the exhibition aligns with Lozano-Hemmer’s long-standing insistence that while artworks are completed by the public, that participation itself is unpredictable, social, and political.


Across the garden, invisible forces are rendered perceptible. Cosmic radiation modulates a rotating beacon; thermal energy disperses into drifting particles; heartbeats animate thousands of lights; voices travel down a path as pulses of illumination and sound. These phenomena—muons, heat signatures, biometric rhythms, acoustic traces—are not metaphors but real signals, captured and transformed through sensing technologies. Yet the exhibition resists the logic of surveillance or accumulation. Many works operate through erasure rather than storage: new inputs overwrite old ones; images dissolve as soon as they appear; records persist only briefly before fading. What emerges is not an archive of data but a choreography of traces—a short-term memory shared among strangers.


This structure of echoes and re-recordings runs throughout the exhibition. Past participants remain present, but only fleetingly: a previous heartbeat glimmers in a bulb; an earlier voice travels farther down the path; a face surfaces momentarily in a spiral of light before disappearing. The garden becomes a site where time folds back on itself, producing a layered present shaped by what has just occurred. Memory in Unfinished Garden is not monumental or fixed; it is unstable, collective, and continually rewritten.


Language, too, appears as something in motion. Indigenous poems flow upward in turbulent streams, asserting linguistic presence against historical erasure, while refusing to stabilize into a single, authoritative reading. Elsewhere, the anatomical mechanics of speech are exposed through endoscopic imagery, linking the material vibration of vocal folds to speculative ideas about atmospheric memory first articulated by Charles Babbage. Voices—archival and newly spoken—activate paths and spaces, producing temporary bonds between unknown participants. These works echo Stuart Hall’s insistence that meaning is not transmitted intact but negotiated, contingent, and relational.


The garden itself is a charged site for such questions. Historically, gardens have functioned as instruments of ordering: enclosed, classified, and controlled representations of nature. In Unfinished Garden, that legacy is unsettled. The exhibition does not impose a singular narrative or viewpoint; instead, it invites visitors to navigate a landscape of partial views, misalignments, and shifting legibilities. Words become readable only from specific positions; sounds assemble differently with each step; images depend on where—and when—you stand. Perception is revealed as bodily, situated, and provisional.


The dramaturgy of the exhibition is therefore experiential rather than linear. Visitors move from the cosmic to the intimate, from collective soundfields to solitary encounters, from the scale of the sky to that of breath and skin. Yet these scales are never isolated. The heartbeat joins thousands of others; a single voice becomes part of a shared cadence; a body’s heat drifts into the surrounding air. Temporary sensory connections emerge, drawing visitors into brief but meaningful interdependence with one another and with the environment they traverse.


As part of Lozano-Hemmer’s ongoing series of outdoor nighttime “art parcours,” Unfinished Garden extends a practice rooted in experiments in art and technology, land art, and sky art, while reconfiguring those traditions through participation and media. Presented in the Chapultepec Forest—a site layered with ecological, historical, and political significance—the exhibition does not seek to resolve uncertainty but to dwell within it. What it offers is not a finished statement, but an invitation: to enter a garden shaped anew by each passing presence.

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