Ana Mosquera: “I use technology to question itself, exploring how it both connects us and commodifies our connections.”

Ana Mosquera uses digital and physical spaces to explore themes of absence, control, and resilience

Ana Mosquera’s work explores identity, belonging, and digital presence, using her personal journey and immersive installations to question how technology and bureaucracy impact our sense of self and connection.

Ana Mosquera’s work challenges the boundaries between the physical and digital, exploring themes of identity, absence, and control. Through interactive elements like QR codes and striking visual aesthetics, her installations transform viewers into active participants, revealing the instability of systems we often take for granted.

In this interview, Mosquera reflects on the duality of technology as both a creative tool and a subject of critique. Her works, such as Tierras Raras and Carnet to Go, invite us to question how randomness, bureaucracy, and digital systems shape our understanding of connection and agency.

How does your experience growing up in Venezuela and now living in Miami influence the themes and narratives you explore in your work?

Growing up in Venezuela, I witnessed the complexities of an unstable political and social climate that ultimately led me to leave, first for Peru in 2016 and then to the U.S. in 2018. Since then, the Venezuelan government has placed countless barriers in the way of updating my passport, which has created complicated situations and left me feeling powerless and disenfranchised over the past five years. This feeling of being “adrift” deeply influences my work, prompting me to question what it means to belong to a place or group and how identification can be wielded as a political tool—or even as a weapon.

In navigating this experience, digital communication technologies have played a crucial role, offering emotional, economic, and social connections that span digital and physical worlds. This dynamic has inspired me to explore digital-physical relations in my work, examining how digital spaces can serve as a bridge for identities and communities scattered across distances. Living in Miami, surrounded by a large Venezuelan community with shared experiences, I’m motivated to initiate conversations around these issues. Through my art, I aim to explore the resilience required to navigate these complexities and invite audiences to engage with themes of belonging, identity, and the ways political forces can impact personal freedom.

“Tierras Raras” examines the blending of digital and physical spaces. What challenges do you face when merging these realms, and how do you hope this affects viewers’ understanding of digital presence?

One of the main challenges in blending digital and physical spaces in Tierras Raras lied in making digital presence feel as tangible and impactful as physical objects in the exhibition. Digital elements can often feel distant or abstract, and the task was to give them a presence that resonates on a sensory level. For example, using physical structures like the blue wall with the vinyl silhouette or the QR code bridge was essential to anchor viewers physically before inviting them into the digital space. I wanted the digital to feel immediate and almost touchable, blurring the lines of what ‘exists’ in each realm.

Another challenge was ensuring that this hybrid space captured the concept of what is absent but still felt—what I refer to as ‘exo presence.’ The 3D-modeled inflatables, which resemble collapsed rafts, serve as digital-only entities that represent a support system existing solely in the digital realm. Through this setup, I hope viewers recognize how digital presence can be deeply impactful even without physical form, shaping our realities and perceptions in ways we might not immediately see. Ultimately, I want this merging of realms to encourage viewers to question their own understanding of presence and absence, and how digital spaces act as both extensions and echoes of our physical world.

Your installations often incorporate QR codes and digital tools that invite interaction. How do you envision the role of audience participation in shaping the meaning of your work?

Audience participation is essential to my work because it transforms viewers from observers to participants, allowing them to co-create the meaning of the piece. By incorporating QR codes and digital tools, I invite audiences to bridge the gap between the physical and digital realms, giving them a sense of agency in exploring what is absent, lost, or metaphorically accessible. This interaction is more than a simple step into the digital; it’s a way to anchor the viewer in both worlds, compelling them to confront their role within these overlapping spaces.

For instance, in Tierras Raras, the QR code serves as an entry point, but viewers must be physically present in the space to access it, emphasizing the connection between their physical presence and the digital dimension they enter. This interplay reveals how digital and physical existences can mirror each other—our actions in one realm shape our experience of the other. Through participation, I hope viewers experience a heightened awareness of how digital presence influences our understanding of memory, identity, and absence, allowing them to feel the weight and implications of these themes in a personal, immediate way.

In “Carnet to Go,” you critique identification systems and introduce randomness into bureaucratic processes. What message are you conveying about identity and the role of chance in shaping our lives?

In “Carnet to Go”, I’m examining how identification—typically viewed as a straightforward, reliable system—is increasingly shaped by arbitrary forces, from bureaucratic red tape to profit-driven technologies. By introducing randomness into the assignment of identification, I aim to reveal how these systems can feel arbitrary, even absurd, when they assign something as personal as an identification number or a future destination based on chance. This randomness encourages viewers to question the rigidity and legitimacy of identification systems, challenging assumptions that these processes are inherently fair or meaningful.

Through interactive elements like QR codes and the Telegram chatbot, visitors experience firsthand how randomness can shape their “assigned” identification, prompting reflection on the bureaucratic forces that shape our lives in unpredictable ways. This mirrors systems like the U.S. Lottery visa, where identification can change one’s trajectory by sheer chance.

The installation critiques how hypercapitalism and technology commodify identification systems, prioritizing convenience, predictability, and control over individual agencies. By immersing participants in this unpredictable process, I hope to prompt them to consider how identification systems—often seen as rational or necessary—can be wielded as tools to limit freedoms, obscure identities, and exert control over individuals.

The visual aesthetics of your work, such as the checkered patterns resembling PNG transparency, are quite striking. How do these design choices contribute to the conceptual themes you are exploring?

The visual aesthetics in my work, such as checkered patterns reminiscent of PNG transparency, are intentional choices to deepen the conceptual themes. In digital contexts, these patterns often signify absence or invisibility—elements that are not fully rendered or accessible only through specific actions. By introducing these signifiers into physical spaces, I emphasize how absence and presence overlap within systems.

In “Carnet to Go” and “Dead Flip”, I use familiar visuals like pinball machines, currency, and value symbols to explore themes of chance, luck, and randomness. Pinball machines are particularly interesting to me because, while they appear chaotic, they are actually games of skill—of managing chaos through precise control. This mirrors bureaucratic systems, which may seem arbitrary but are governed by hidden rules that influence outcomes.

In “Dead Flip”, the concept of the “dead flip” move—a strategic moment where the player does nothing to maintain control—serves as a metaphor for calculated inaction. This manoeuvre, where success is achieved through restraint, reflects the patience required to navigate complex systems. By designing a visually chaotic pinball layout without a ball, I seek the viewer to find strategic passivity, exploring how inaction can be a deliberate response within systems that feel chaotic or uncontrollable.

The design choices across my works—whether the checkered patterns in Tierras Raras, the pinball aesthetics in “Dead Flip”, or the disposable identity elements in “Carnet to Go”—form a cohesive system that conceptually examines how individuals interact with structures of control. Together, these elements aim to anchor viewers in an experience where presence and absence, control and randomness, are constantly in flux. Through these visual and interactive layers, I hope viewers recognize the inherent instability of systems, the role of chance, and the invisible forces that shape identity.

Much of your work addresses the commodification of human connections in a technological world. How do you balance the critique of technology with the necessity of using it to create your art?

In my work, I approach technology as both a theme and a medium, which allows me to navigate its complexities from within. Technology profoundly shapes how we connect and view concepts like identity and belonging, but it also has a tendency to reduce relationships to something measurable or consumable. By using technology to critique itself, I aim to explore this ambivalence—revealing how it simultaneously connects and commodifies.

Heidegger readers would likely critique this dynamic, warning that technology, by its nature, tends to “enframe” human experiences, casting relationships as resources to be optimized or controlled. This perspective pushes me to consider all the time whether technology, as both my medium and subject, risks reinforcing the very structures it seeks to question. My goal, then, becomes not only to use technology but also to expose the limitations it places on how we understand connection and identity. For example, in works like Carnet to Go and Tierras Raras, I examine how identification and relationships become mediated through digital and bureaucratic systems, which can often feel depersonalizing or even alienating.

Balancing this dual role of technology requires a conscious awareness of its capacity to shape and obscure human interactions. By engaging viewers in this tension, I hope to create moments of reflection, inviting them to question how technology frames their own relationships. Ultimately, I aim to reveal both the empowerment and the limitations that come from a technologically mediated world, encouraging audiences to consider whether technology truly deepens connection or subtly commodifies it.

EDITOR’S HIGHLIGHTS