San Luis Potosí, SLP.— San Luis Potosí’s cultural scene is enriched by the arrival of the International Multimedia Art Festival CYFEST 16, an exhibition that goes beyond aesthetics to become a dialogue between tradition, technology and the region’s vast creative potential.
Entitled “Archive of Feelings. A Journey”, the exhibition is being presented at the Aether Contemporary Art Gallery until 1 October 2025, as a collaboration between the gallery and CYLAND MediaArtLab.
This festival, with sixteen years of history, has established itself as one of the world’s most important media art platforms. Its “nomadic” nature has enabled it to travel to numerous countries and collaborate with more than 350 artists. Such is the event’s quality and prestige that last year it formed part of the Venice Art Biennale.
CYFEST’s arrival in San Luis Potosí is no coincidence. It was in Venice that Sergio Padilla, owner of the Aether Gallery, met CYLAND’s founders, Alexandra Dementieva and Anna Frants. A year of arrangements by Manolo Cocho, a partner in the gallery, and a journey through the Potosí desert convinced the organisers that the San Luis Potosí highlands were the ideal place to host the festival. The Aether Gallery’s vision, focused on connecting art with its surroundings, resonated with CYFEST’s proposal to explore the connection between tradition and the avant-garde.
The exhibition, which is free and open to everyone, invites visitors to question the relationship between human sensitivity and digital systems. The works on display, from robotic installations and augmented-reality tapestries to video installations and sound pieces, demonstrate how technology is not only a tool but also a mediator of the human condition.
Curator Alexandra Dementieva emphasised the importance of this approach, noting that the future of art lies in exploring new technologies to create new forms of expression. The CYFEST 16 exhibition seeks precisely that: to build a bridge between craftsmanship, code, memory and imagination.
Although CYFEST is known as an art festival, its organisers emphasise that it is part of a larger organisation called CYLAND, which develops multidisciplinary projects, such as LASER Talks, in collaboration with prestigious institutions such as MIT, Brussels and Yerevan, encouraging dialogue between artists, scientists, programmers and philosophers.
The festival’s presence in San Luis Potosí represents an opportunity for cultural development, the encouragement of innovation and connection with the global scientific and technological world.
English translation of the original Spanish article. Descriptions and historical claims are retained as stated by the publication.