RAFA CUEVAS
MEXICO, 1984

Rafa Cuevas is a Mexican artist working with sound, image, clothing, space and the internet. For more than two decades, his practice has moved between physical and digital formats, using different media as part of the same body of work.

His practice began to take shape in the early 2000s through fashion. He debuted as a model at Fashion Week Mexico, moved into styling and soon started making clothes. At 21, he presented his first runway collection. Over the following years he developed and presented clothing collections and runway shows, while working as a creative director and stylist for Mexican artists and celebrities. His involvement often extended to the construction of the show itself, coordinating runways, developing choreography and shaping the relationship between clothing, bodies, music and image.

Music was developing at the same time and has remained central to his work. Since 2005, he has written, composed and produced his own material, moving between electronic and live formats and drawing from pop, rock, ambient, techno and experimental sound. Working in Mexico City during the emergence of electroclash, he began combining electronic production with live band formats. His first full-length album, The Mexican Way, was released in 2016. In 2022, he signed with Warner Chappell Music as a songwriter, extending his work into writing for other artists and projects.

Sound also became part of his fashion practice. He has composed and produced music for runway shows and fashion films, treating a soundtrack as part of the construction of a collection rather than as an element added afterward. This exchange between music and fashion became characteristic of a practice in which clothes, bodies, movement, sound and image could be developed together.

As these areas developed, the distinctions between them became less useful. Records, clothes, photographs, graphics, websites, videos, exhibitions, installations, DJ sets and cultural projects began to coexist within the same practice. His fashion collections and runway work have been presented in Mexico and New York, while collaborations have placed him in different roles according to the project, from designer and stylist to creative director, music producer and image-maker.

In 2026, during the FIFA World Cup, the Guadalajara city government, through its Department of Culture, commissioned him to create Eleven Ways to Wear a Jersey, an installation of eleven mannequins combining football jerseys with second-hand urban clothing in an environment of light, smoke, sound and secular altars. At its center was Sacrilegio, an upcycled garment made by cutting apart collectible football jerseys and combining fragments from different teams, drawing from bootleg culture and the almost sacred value attached to football memorabilia. The installation brought fashion, styling, upcycling and spatial design together to examine fandom, identity, consumption and collective belonging.

More recent projects have increasingly brought several of these interests into the same space. Museo Rave approaches nightlife and electronic music as material for exhibition, performance and cultural production, while Objetos Disponibles looks at clothing through collection, circulation, reuse and display. These projects move between independent culture and institutional spaces without treating one as separate from the other.

DJing has followed a similar trajectory. What began as a relationship with music and nightlife developed into another way of working with audiences, spaces and cultural references. His sets move across electronic music, pop, disco, new wave, rock and other genres, with edits, mashups and unexpected combinations forming part of the language rather than adherence to a single scene.

The internet has been present throughout much of this trajectory, not simply as a place to document or promote the work, but as another space in which to make, publish, design, archive and experiment. Websites, graphic systems, social platforms and digital images are treated as cultural formats in their own right, alongside physical objects and live experiences.

Today, a project might become a song, a garment, an image, a website, an installation, an exhibition or an event. The medium is determined by the idea rather than the other way around. Across these forms, the work continues to return to identity, popular culture, transformation, memory and the ways people construct meaning through the objects, images, sounds and spaces that surround them.