Benjamín Torres is a Mexico City–based visual artist whose practice explores the space between objects, images, and the systems that give them meaning. Trained in sculpture at the National School of Plastic Arts at UNAM, Torres later expanded his practice into a more open, post-conceptual approach to three-dimensional work, drawing from consumer culture, media, public space, and the everyday objects that surround us.His process often begins with collecting, dismantling, appropriating, and re-contextualizing. Familiar objects and materials are taken apart and rearranged, allowing their original functions to become something else entirely. Through assemblage and intervention, Torres turns the ordinary into a space for questioning how we consume, inhabit, and understand the world around us.His work has been exhibited extensively in Mexico and internationally, including at Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Museo Universitario del Chopo, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, and the New York Public Library, and forms part of collections including JUMEX, Fundación RAC, USC Fischer Museum of Art, and the Spencer Collection. He is also part of the SOMA tutoring team and has been a member of Mexico's National System of Art Creators since 2018.
During his residency at Hotel El Ganzo, Benjamín Torres took one of the most unremarkable objects in a hotel room—a refrigerator—and made it impossible to look at in quite the same way again.Torres dismantled the appliance and reconstructed it within the same room, stripping away its familiar function and exposing the mechanics normally hidden behind its everyday use. The gesture draws from the legacy of the ready-made, but rather than simply presenting an ordinary object as art, Torres takes it apart and puts it back together, making the process of transformation part of the work itself.The refrigerator becomes something between machine, sculpture, and archaeological fragment. Once associated with comfort, consumption, and the private rituals of a hotel room, it is suddenly opened up for inspection—its components exposed and its purpose suspended.There is something particularly fitting about the intervention taking place inside a functioning hotel. An object designed to quietly serve the guest becomes the subject of attention instead. By shifting it from background to foreground, Torres invites us to reconsider the things we normally stop seeing: the technologies that support our daily lives, the objects we consume, and the thin line between function and art.In true Torres fashion, the refrigerator didn't need to leave the room to become something else. It simply needed to be taken apart.
Many of the artworks, murals, and interventions that have shaped the hotel over the years were never intended to exist forever. As artists arrive, spaces evolve, and new conversations emerge, certain works transform, disappear, or make room for new interventions.This constant evolution is central to El Ganzo’s identity. The hotel experienced today is not the same one that existed six months ago, nor the one that will exist six months from now. Through change, the space remains alive, continuously shaped by the artists, musicians, and communities that pass through it.The works featured in this archive are no longer physically on view, but they remain an essential part of El Ganzo’s artistic legacy and ongoing cultural history.
