Aguas Frescas is a performance by artist Barbara Sanchez-Kane, created for the tenth anniversary of her label and co-commissioned by Mudam and TONO Festival. Drawing on Mexican street culture and the communal ritual of drinking horchata, the work turns poetry into a shared, sensorial event: Malinche chairs hold glass containers of horchata, a metallic spoon stirring each one at its own tempo, and collaborators move through the installation in acts. The stirring spoons give the room a rhythm before any music begins. The piece premiered at Mudam, Luxembourg, on May 17, 2025, and was presented by Performance Space New York in the Keith Haring Theatre on April 17 and 18, 2026.
Debit’s act closes the performance. She performs with a mariachi band, moving through three Mexican standards: Cielito Lindo, Sin Ti, and Volver Volver — songs everyone in the room already carries. The mariachi arrangements keep them whole while her flute pulls against them, breath running over melodies that belong to the street as much as to the stage.
For the Performance Space presentation she performed on the zapatos flauta, the flute shoes: footwear built as wind instruments. The shoe, the most literal point of contact between a body and the street, becomes a flute. Walking and playing stop being separate acts. The instrument enters the same world as the horchata glasses and the stirring spoons: ordinary objects of Mexican street life made resonant.
The zapatos flauta will enter the Museum at FIT’s exhibition of work by Willy Chavarria and Sanchez-Kane in February 2027, carrying the instrument from performance into the museum. Within Debit’s practice, Aguas Frescas is the folk archive without the machine: where The Long Count and Desaceleradas reconstruct Mexican sonic memory through models, cassettes, and synthesis, this performance works the same memory through breath, leather, and a band that has played these songs for decades. The question is the one that runs through her records: who keeps a culture’s sound, and in what body does it live on.
