Lorena Barquet, also known as Hardcorette, is a Mexican artist and performer who has carved out a niche for herself in a vibrant scene that is not without its challenges. We spoke with her about her vision, her perseverance, and her perspective on the rise of performance art in Mexico.
“I could have a FONCA grant, I could be a diva, I could pretend to be crazy, I could flee the country, I could live in the sea forever. I could work eight hours a day, I could be a good friend, I could be your lover, I could be brilliant, I could tell you that I don’t really mean it,” reads one of the verses Lorena used to share a few years ago on her old blog, diariodeunactrizmaleducada.
“I’ve already done almost all of that, except get the scholarship; although, to be honest, I haven’t even tried,” he says.
Times have changed, though he makes it clear that that text belongs to the past and he no longer identifies with it very much. He hasn’t lived at sea either, by the way.
Formation and early fractures
The Ban on Performance and the Birth of a Calling
A few years ago, he decided to devote himself to performance art and combine that passion with the visual arts, in addition to occasionally participating in highly popular theatrical productions. Among these, his participation in El Foro Teatro Contemporáneo, directed by the Polish director Ludwik Margules in Mexico City.
“The director had a very particular view of performance art, and he considered it ‘the bastard child of theater,'” Lorena recalls. When Margules died unexpectedly halfway through the program and the academy closed, she had to enroll at the Casa Azul performing arts school, where—she admits—she never expected to graduate by performing a play from Spain’s Golden Age, when her main interest was actually studying contemporary theater.
It was during that period that he began to explore a world where he didn’t have to memorize his lines from The Dog in the Manger. “The first time I went to a performance class, I was a little scared,” she recalls. “They gave us a needle and asked us to sew a clothing label onto our skin. Those exercises were very disruptive and transgressive for me at the time.”
During those years, Lorena moved to Portugal for a while, deeply in love, to live in a self-sustaining anarchist community. Upon returning to Mexico, in the midst of a bout of depression, she began to focus more on performance art, and that—in a way—saved her life: “I sought to do things so I wouldn’t die, to explore, and I continue to do so: living the art of action.”
A performance style that establishes an identity
That’s how she began performing at parties and events, and her career soon took off.
“Everything comes to me in everyday moments. The ‘epiphenomenon’”—as the artist Juan José Gurrola put it, describing the collection of casual, fleeting thoughts that arise when reflective or rational thought is in a state of ‘not thinking’—“is a fundamental part of my creative process,” she says.
“The performance is very generous because it gives you such powerful and striking images; you enter a meditative state” — Lorena Barquet.
She avoids, however, offering a personal definition of performance art: “To define it is to limit it, ” she says, and prefers to understand it, essentially, as an art form in which the body is the medium.
The Rise of Performance Art in Mexico and Latin America
“We’re experiencing a performance art boom in Mexico,” says Lorena. And not just here: throughout Latin America, many venues—including festivals, museums, and cultural centers—have established permanent programs dedicated to this discipline.
Independent platforms are also proliferating. “In the early 2000s, it was largely overlooked: we had figures like Pancho López—now director of the Extra! International Performing Arts Festival—or the controversial Rocío Boliver—La Congelada de Uva—but there wasn’t much understanding of that form of artistic expression.
“But these days, everyone wants to be a performer,” he says. “And I wouldn’t call it fake performance; there’s just so much of it, and not all of it is very good.”
The History of Mexican Performance Art
Since the 1990s, key figures such as Roberto Escobar, Melquiades Herrera, Maris Bustamante, and Felipe Ehrenberg have been championing Mexican performance art from institutions such as the Carrillo Gil Art Museum.
The following decades were pivotal and set the stage for the current boom, which, while it may sometimes blend in with mainstream trends, remains a subversive and essential cultural bastion within experimental art.
When, at the beginning of this decade, art fairs such as Zona Maco and Material Art Fair, as well as various interdisciplinary festivals, began to include performance art in their programs, the discipline gained institutional recognition that significantly diminished its aura of marginality.
Museums, fairs, and a scene dominated by women
Venues such as MUAC, Ex Teresa Arte Actual, the Tamayo Museum, the Centro de Cultura Digital, or the Museo Jumex—with curatorial projects linked to the body—have joined the trend of recent years, presenting works by artists such as Noemí Ontiveros, Deborah Castillo, Mónica Mayer—a pioneer of national feminist performance art—, Julio Barriga, the very pop-art Polimera, and Andrés Gudiño.
Is it obvious that the balance is also heavily tilted toward the female side?
Lorena Barquet: between stages, theaters, and screens
But Lorena doesn’t feel like she belongs to any particular scene either: “I never thought to myself, ‘I’m going to be a performer!’ I’ve never followed a single path,” she admits.
He has always felt more at home working on underground projects such as Plástico 2012 (2015), by Ricardo Soto, or Spells and Magicians Chapter Six: Vehicle Park (2015), by Gabriel Reyes.
Explorations, Recent Works, and International Collaborations
As an artist, he has also explored other areas. In 2019, he created a piece with the Japanese gallery Aoyama Meguro for the Material Art Fair in Mexico City. It was titled Cut Your Hair Here and literally consisted of cutting people’shair.
Audiovisual works and criticism of visual culture
Her experience a few years ago as part of the cast of the hit play *Mentiras* was different, because it involved success, money, and fans: “It was serious theater, like on Broadway: microphones, wigs, makeup, sold-out shows… but it wasn’t my thing; the atmosphere among the actresses was really ugly and competitive.”
Another of her recent audiovisual works, *Los weyes del maguey* (2024), is a short film that’s more melodramatic than experimental. In this cheesy mini-film about heartbreak, Lorena plays herself: “It’s a short film that’s funny, but going through the story was actually pretty sad.”
The play opens with traditional music and images of Pedro Infante in a kitschy setting.
Metaporn, Artificial Intelligence, and New Perspectives
In 2024, he presented *Metaporno*, a reflection on what might lie beyond pornography in a society saturated with sexualized images. “The installation consisted of a series of mixed-media paintings and photographs printed on canvas, painted in oil and enhanced with some artificial intelligence.”
This work was featured at the last edition of Zona Maco. “I’ve also created short video performances and photographs conceived as old portraits altered with paint, such as the black-and-white photos of grandmothers with touches of color,” she explains.
Performance, Censorship, and Low Blows to Performance
Have cancel culture and political correctness affected the world of performance art? “When you open a performance to the public, be careful: there may be people who get upset and say, ‘That’s not art.’ You can set a boundary with the audience or you can open it up to others,” he says, citing Marina Abramović as an example: “She taught us that: she set out a table with a gun or a knife so the audience could do whatever they wanted—they could even have ended her life.”
For Lorena, performance art is extreme by nature, and being told you can’t do this or that isn’t helpful. “What’s true is that it’s a living art form that has to keep adapting, but I think all that censorship on social media and the online backlash really were a low blow to performance art.”
New Works and Creative Horizons Looking Ahead to 2026: Art Weekend
Lorena is currently working on new pieces to be presented in 2026 and will resume work on a post-drama titled *Las mujeres horror*.
In addition, he presented the performance COATL at Studio Berlín during Art Week CDMX, which he describes as “a live sound performance that explores the body as a space that reinterprets the tattoo as a means of transformation, creating a bodily archive in which vulnerability, resistance, and rebirth are captured.”
This work explores the concepts of scars, rupture, and heartbreak. It was created in collaboration with artists Matías Solar and IMAABS.
Lorena Barquet’s career demonstrates that performance art in Mexico has established itself as a fertile ground for experimentation, dissent, and the creation of new bodily narratives.
The cover photo is by Gustavo Cisneros.
Follow Lorena Barquet on Instagram.
More articles by Latin American artists in AW Magazine.
